American Archives Research Articles

Americanisation, sovietisation, and resistance at Kabul University: limits of the educational reforms

The paper compares the American and Soviet transformations at Kabul University, Afghanistan, during the 1960s to the 1980s explained in terms of Americanisation and Sovietisation. Using new declassified documents from both American and former Soviet archives, the author reveals that both powers attempted to impose their rival models of university education in Afghanistan. However, resistance on the part of the Afghan university undermined both of their cultural influences, thus causing their policies of reform to eventually fail. The case of Kabul University demonstrates the inability of the superpowers to encourage the formation of pliable students and professors. Despite crucial transformations in the structure, administration apparatus, and content of disciplines, both superpowers were not able to change the traditions and values of professors and students. The university community has been proven to be the main cause for the success or failure of any reforms brought to a university by external powers.

Control, Disempowerment, Fear, and Fantasy: Violent Criminality During the Early American Occupation of Germany, March‐July 1945

To date, scholars have provided seemingly contradictory accounts of violent crime during the US occupation of Germany. Social disorder and violence are commonly described extending for months or years after the war. For scholars of US Military Government, however, the imposition of a strict military regime precluded such crime. Meanwhile, Alan Kramer's quantitative study suggests lower rates of violent criminality and Jose Canoy found fear of crime may have exaggerated perceptions of violence. Both studies reveal how little is known about criminality during the early occupation. This article seeks to clarify divergent accounts by examining new records from German and American archives, and providing a more comprehensive account of criminal violence in the US Zone during the transition from war to peace, March to July 1945. This narrow window of time complements a well‐documented increase in American‐perpetrated violent crime. The present study uses data of civilian criminality alongside discovery of higher rates of American crime. It reveals a wave of severe disorder that Military Government rapidly brought under control. But in the process, Germans were disempowered and left at the mercy of American soldiers. Consequently, society remained violent even as civilians were forced to live by tight military standards.

Negotiation with a Reclusive Regime

The United States’ strategic pivot to the Asia Pacific has been interpreted as representing a kind of return for the Americans to Southeast Asia. While the U.S. relationship with many countries in the region has been historically strong (in Cambodia, Vietnam, the Philippines, Thailand, and Indonesia), Myanmar (Burma) has always seemed outside of the American orbit. In actuality, Myanmar has had a long historical relationship with the United States (beginning with American Baptist missionaries in the 1810s). The present volume focuses on the period after 1945. Presidential Research Professor in the Department of History at Northern Illinois University, Kenton Clymer has written much on several Southeast Asian countries (the Philippines, Cambodia, and now Myanmar), as well as India, and their relationship with the United States. He is an old hand at the relevant American archives (the National Archives and the relevant presidential libraries), as well as the archives of the UK, Australia, and Myanmar, as is revealed by the trove of source materials he has uncovered to document this study. The book consumes over 400 pages of densely packed text divided into fourteen chapters. The publisher made the choice of rendering his citations into endnotes rather than footnotes, which will make reading the book a joy to some, but to others, interested in checking sources as one reads, progress is a little onerous.

Absence and the advertising historian

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to examine the commonly held idea that American advertising agencies closely supervised their Australian counterparts during the globalization of advertising. Design/methodology/approach The author, a cultural historian based in the USA, searched American archives without finding evidence of the kind of oversight often associated with the Americanization of advertising. Findings The paper concludes that American advertisers paid less attention to Australian advertising than the other way around. In addition, Australian and American advertising industries agreed on the importance of advertising as part of transnational capitalism and did not need to outline, or follow instructions, on how advertising worked. Originality/value Reviewing the history of advertising in a global context reminds scholars that the national advertising industries have different subject positions and yet agree on advertising’s practice and efficacy.

Selling Servitude, Captivating Consumers

After the abolition of Russian serfdom and American slavery in 1861 and 1865, respectively, businesses played an important role in molding popular attitudes about post-emancipation integration processes in Russia and the United States through visual representations of serfs, peasants, slaves, and freedpeople in advertisements. Both American and Russian companies developed parallel marketing strategies by constructing advertisements that depicted African Americans and peasants in positions of servitude, which appealed to consumers who were nostalgic for an idealized rural, pre-industrial and pre-emancipation era during an age of rapid industrialization, urbanization, and geographic expansion. But Russian and American companies also pursued divergent marketing tactics that beg further consideration. While US businesses predominantly disparaged African Americans in racialized caricatures, Russian businesses sometimes depicted peasants in positions of equality relative to other citizens. What accounts for this disparity? This article examines newspaper ads, posters, broadsides, and ephemera from collections at Russian and American archives, and argues that apart from perceived racial differences in the case of US ads, dissimilarities between Russian and American population compositions, urban migration patterns, and distinct notions of national identity also explain this important distinction.

World War I in the Arabian Peninsula… in Search of Sources

Historians are dependent on sources to build their arguments and narratives. We generally begin with local and state archives of the regions we are dealing with. Indeed, the study of World War I was based on national sources produced inside the countries under consideration. In the beginning, these were mostly European and American archives, given that “The Great War” was initially often conceived of as a European war, reflecting the fact that it started in Europe, and that many parts of the ...

America in Ruins: Cooper, Child, and the Problem of the National House

This essay examines the ways in which American authors writing what were some of the first “American” novels included images of buildings being razed, pulled down, and otherwise demolished. Specifically, I argue that the houses at the heart of two early revolutionary romances--James Fenimore Cooper’s wildly popular The Spy, a Tale of the Neutral Ground (1821) and Lydia Maria Child’s highly anticipated second novel, The Rebels; or, Boston before the Revolution (1825)--function as examples of European architecture and architectural-imaginary practices. These authors are responding to a desire for a unique American architectural archive that would, as Thomas Jefferson hoped, relfect the new nation’s history and identity. Yet, the design of these houses and their material afterlives frustrate a neat narrative of architectural-national progression. Though these houses closely resemble their European cousins (English country houses and Enlightenment temples) their destruction does not signal a hopeful moment of (re)constructing American national Identity. Rather, the destruction of these homes registers a moment of deep pathos and trauma in both novels and in the wake of their destruction, no architectural alternative appears to record the nation’s history.

Beyond Recovery: A Process Approach to Research on Women in Early African American Print Cultures

Beyond Recovery:A Process Approach to Research on Women in Early African American Print Cultures Barbara McCaskill At the end of a busy fall semester at my university, one of my undergraduates, a biracial student descended from enslaved Africans, asked me to evaluate a photograph from the early African American archives. Like many of us, her extended family in the deep South stays in touch through postings on a group Facebook page. One of her aunts had generated considerable excitement among these Facebook devotees after sharing a capture of an antebellum photograph. The black-and-white image presented a hatless, lightly tanned man in a dark suit, seated beside a dark-skinned woman in a plaid frock, with a toddler who looked all of two or three years old clinging shyly to her knee. More than the image, it was the image’s backstory that inspired family members to drench this post with emoticons like the cheers cascading from celebrants at an sec football game. The aunt had claimed to be in possession of a photograph of one of the family’s earliest known ancestors: an enslaved African American woman, Ella Webb, whose lifelong object of affection had been her white owner’s son Edward. According to the story, in order to attain the happiness and bliss that follow marriage to the desire of one’s heart, Edward had willingly accepted the fates of disinheritance by his family and rejection by the scions of the bayou country’s planter classes.1 With my student’s permission, I shared the photograph with three colleagues at my institution: a Civil War historian, a historian of southern cultures, and an expert in textiles and fashion design who specializes in African and African American clothing. Based on the couple’s attire and the quality of the image, we quickly debunked my student’s claims of Civil War–era attribution, even though the romantic companion story may eventually prove true. It was also unlikely, we concluded, that a deep South, pre–Civil War pair of intimates, where one person was black and the other white, would risk bodily harm to themselves and their families by sitting together for the shoot, unless they were a black mammy and the white child she was raising. Images of mixed-race couples were so taboo that even after the Civil War, for example, Ellen Craft, a black woman who had passed [End Page 12] as a southern white man in order to escape slavery, and her darker-skinned husband, William Craft, left behind no known images of themselves posed together as man and wife.2 What seemed at first disappointing, however, led to a spirited discussion of how the “tangled skeins” that “are the genealogies of slavery,” as Harriet Jacobs described them in her Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861),3 have informed narratives of community, legacy, loss, survival, passing, and social mobility in the oral histories of African American families. Similarly, they have informed such nineteenth-century American literary productions as Julia C. Collins’s Curse of Caste; or, The Slave Bride (1865) and Frederick Douglass’s best-selling Narrative (1845), as well as twenty-first-century works like Mat Johnson and Warren Pleece’s Incognegro: A Graphic Mystery (2009) and Natasha Trethewey’s Thrall: Poems (2012). This conversation left me with a renewed sense of pride and exhilaration for the work that scholars do and have done to think about early African American print cultures, particularly what this record tells us about the lives and loves of African American women like Ella. Our scholarship on early African American women has been enriched by our analysis of their appearances in visual as well as textual productions: engravings, photographs, books, pamphlets, broadsides and circulars, newspapers, serial publications, and unpublished manuscripts from diaries to journals to scrapbooks. We have also closed gaps in our knowledge of what these women thought and did by studying printers, their presses and publishing houses, and the editors, subscription agents, and readers who consumed and circulated what they printed. Notwithstanding Daniel Murray’s bibliographical research for the American Negro Exhibit at the 1900 Paris Exposition,4 and early educational attempts by periodicals...

La AFL-CIO y el sindicalismo español, 1953-1971

This article seeks to examine the relationships of the U.S. trade union confederation, AFL-CIO, with both the «Vertical» (Francoist) and the anti-Franco labour unions. The time frame analysed covers from the signing of Spanish-American military pacts of 1953 to the summer of 1971. During that time, the interaction between the unions of both sides of the Atlantic was significantly influenced by two factors: 1) the climate of tension and very high politicization of the Cold War, that conflict of ideas rather than bombs ; 2) the traumatic memory of the Republican defeat in the Spanish civil war. The relationships were affected harder by the first factor, since it lasted throughout the whole period analysed; the second was higher at the beginning, but was progressively loosing momentum, more slowly among the Spanish syndicalist than among their American or European counterparts. In any case, both conditions generated a sort of «lens» through which the reality was perceived. Perceptions, stereotypes and strong political polarization, which, sometimes, distorted what was really happening. The State Department and the AFL -CIO shared information, and occasionally objectives in its relations with the Spanish trade unionists. From the documentation studied here, it cannot be concluded, however, that the AFL-CIO was always a mere «puppet» in the State Department and the CIA’s hands, as some authors have affirmed. I will try to explain the ins and outs of such connections, confronting American archives with Spanish sources.

Making African American History in the Classroom

This article argues that getting students to learn about archival preservation and research in the context of an underpreserved, underresearched history offers a number of pedagogical rewards. Colleges and universities are pushing to increase community-based learning opportunities for undergraduates. At the same time, digital humanities initiatives are making it increasingly possible for undergraduates to work hands-on with primary sources, and a number of university-sponsored efforts are being made to process and digitize neglected African American archives. Many of these projects make use of graduate student labor, but few have recognized the benefits of engaging undergraduates in processing local and minority archives as part of their classroom experience. This article argues that such classes would not only build mutually beneficial relationships between town and gown but also encourage students to recognize that the approach to history they are familiar with—one that emphasizes national leaders and “major” events—is part of the same tendency to value the powerful that has caused African American history to be underpreserved. Preserving and publicizing local histories counters this tendency and may help produce a younger generation of scholars who are attuned to politics of power and privilege within the scholarship they encounter and produce.

Hunting Nazis in Franco’s Spain by David A. Messenger (review)

Reviewed by: Hunting Nazis in Franco’s Spain by David A. Messenger Sandra Ott Hunting Nazis in Franco’s Spain. By David A. Messenger. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2014. Pp. xi + 218. Cloth $34.76. ISBN 978-0807155639. In Hunting Nazis in Franco’s Spain, David A. Messenger provides a fascinating, meticulously researched account of the development and implementation of the Allied program to repatriate “obnoxious Germans” (5) from Spain to occupied Germany in the postwar years. Repatriation subjected Germans to the process of denazification, including internment, interrogation, and possibly judicial proceedings. “Obnoxious Germans” were mainly Nazi intelligence agents, SS men, and party officials. When World War II ended in 1945, the Allies feared a revival of the Third Reich in Spain. The Germans had a longstanding presence there, with deep roots in both the Spanish economy and society. During the Spanish Civil War, some nineteen thousand Germans volunteered to serve in Hitler’s Condor Legion. Many of them had ties with Spain through family or business, or involvement with its German community before 1936. Such men made prime candidates for service in Nazi intelligence networks. Nazi agents operated across Spain during the Civil War and World War II, despite Spain’s official neutrality. German spies often exchanged information with their Spanish counterparts and the national police. In late 1944, the British raised a key postwar issue in so-called neutral countries: what should be the postwar fate of Germans who had engaged in political, commercial, or espionage activities? The issue forms the focus of Messenger’s study of the repatriation program. By April 1946, some ten thousand Germans remained in Spain. British and American embassies identified 1,677 Germans for repatriation. Allied diplomats pressed Franco’s regime to comply with the program and even provided means of transportation back to Germany. The Allies, however, received minimal cooperation from Franco’s regime. Spanish officials promised to comply with the program but responded unenthusiastically. The Allies eventually realized that Spain’s frustratingly slow response to the repatriation scheme derived not only from a lack of cooperation at the top but also from complicity at the grass roots level. The Spanish police, Spanish citizens, members of the German colony, and Catholic priests variously enabled “obnoxious Germans” to stay put. One of the most fascinating chapters in the book explores the dynamics underlying German attempts to obtain exemption from repatriation. Operating at the intersections of history and ethnography, Messenger makes excellent use of declassified documents in the Spanish Foreign Ministry as well as in British and American archives. He found that petitions for exemption revealed several clever strategies to avoid repatriation. While not disavowing their Nazi past, Germans commonly argued that it was Francoism and their political commitment to Franco’s regime that had motivated them during both civil and world wars (113). They cast their Nazi activities as service not only to the Nationalist “crusade” but also to Franco’s anticommunism [End Page 442] crusade (116). Germans similarly used religion to enhance their image as loyalists to Franco by emphasizing their devotion to Catholicism (121). Finally, many Germans who had lived in Spain before Hitler came to power in 1933 claimed insider status as German Spaniards. Most of them had married Spanish women, raised families, and established social relations in Spanish communities. They projected a “practiced” Spanish identity and sought to achieve “social” citizenship as a means of gaining Franco’s protection (100). As Messenger shows, “obnoxious Germans” skillfully utilized Franco’s postwar discourse about the meaning of membership in the New Spain. Spanish officials willingly supported their efforts on the grounds of “incorporation into Spanish life.” In parallel, many Germans also continued to develop a Nazi identity in what came to be known as “werewolf” groups—Nazi resistance movements designed to operate secretly behind Allied lines. Although never large in number, such groups came under the close scrutiny of Allied intelligence agencies that feared the spread of Nazi ideology in Spain. By 1947, the Spanish authorities had forced only 265 Germans into repatriation. Individuals on the Allies’ priority lists typically managed to remain in Spain or to make their way to Argentina, among other destinations. By the end of...

The Kosovo Issue and Albano–Yugoslav Relations, 1961–1981

The Yugoslav Federation never satisfactorily resolved the problem posed by the Albanians of Kosovo. Emerging from a period of intense repression, Kosovo in the 1960s and 1970s underwent rapid political development, including the creation of autonomous political institutions. The Kosovo issue was directly affected by developments in Albano–Yugoslav relations—themselves subject to events in the wider world—and by internal developments within Yugoslavia, in which Albania had a strong interest. Throughout the period the issue remained a staple in Albania’s ideological war with Yugoslavia. Wary of the official Kosovar political leadership and suspicious of the nascent Kosovar national movement, Albania was alarmed by Kosovar demands for republican status. Ironically, the reaction of Albania and Yugoslavia to these demands was not dissimilar. This study is based on an analysis of recent historical research, as well as on recently released documents from Kosovar, Albanian, Serbian, and American archives.

Prophets, evangelists, and missionaries: Trans-Atlantic interactions in the emergence of Nigerian Pentecostalism

This article historicizes the contemporary Pentecostal movement in Nigeria by examining relationships between Nigerian prophets, British missionaries, and American evangelists in the 1930s and 1940s. First, the article challenges assumptions about the genealogy and chronology of Nigerian Pentecostalism by taking a close look at the beginnings of the Christ Apostolic Church. Then, it discusses new evidence which reveals the surprising influence of a marginal American evangelist and renegade British missionary on the church's doctrine. Making use of a wide range of evidence from Nigerian, Welsh, and American archives, the article argues that while the Aladura movement may have had indigenous origins, its development made significant use of foreign support and did so much earlier than has been appreciated by previous studies. The larger significance of this argument is that it shows the mutual constitution of American, British, and Nigerian Pentecostalism; instead of emerging first in the US and UK and then being taken to Africa, Pentecostalism's development across the Atlantic was coeval.

The Cardinal Mindszenty Files from American Archives

The Cardinal Mindszenty Files from American Archives

The Fire of Revolution: A Counterfactual Analysis of the Polish-Bolshevik War, 1919 to 1920

In August, 1920, the fate of Europe hung in the balance. Bolshevik forces stood poised to take Warsaw, while Lenin contemplated the possibility of invading Germany. General von Seeckt in Germany considered renouncing the Treaty of Versailles, thus threatening a new world war. In France and Great Britain, senior leaders reluctantly and with great hesitation discussed military intervention in Eastern Europe. Using primary source material from American, British, German, and Polish archives, this study offers new conclusions about the landscape of post-war Europe through a counterfactual analysis of the Battle of Warsaw.

IŠEIVIJOS BIBLIOFILIJOS PAVELDAS: JUSTINAS K. KARAZIJA

Bibliophile activity in exile is one of the important and interesting areas of Lithuanian book culture. However, it is not well researched. We rarely talk about valuabel libraries and collections of bibliophiles, except when they are donated to the memory institutions of the homeland. Many of them were collected by physicians, diplomats, artists, and priests who have reached high social standing. Justinas K. Karazija (1892–1991) belonged to the first generation of Lithuanians in the USA. He belonged to the working class (was a steel industry worker) and participated in the social-democratic movement. Karazija’s personal library included publications from 1891–1976 published in exile and in the homeland: books, periodicals, maps. During the later years of his life, the owner has made a bibliographic description of this library and donated it to the American Lithuanian Cultural Archive (ALKA) in Putnam (Connecticut, USA). In this article, six aspects of the library are analysed: the age of publications, languages, publishing places, contents, typology, and the level of individuality. The data allows the author to claim that the library has influenced the formation of the personality, provided possibilities of the intellectual development and stimulated creativity. At the same time it symbolized a minimal, re-located homeland and was oriented to the preservation of the national identity. The library helped to create the physical space and the spiritual microcosm on the basis of the national identity. The case of Karazija’s library proves that this feature of intelectual elevation was characteristic not only to the inteligentsia groups but also to the members of the working social stratas. The microcosm of a personal library enabled them to identify and forecast the future changes of the emigrant community and to define their own place and role in it.

Farewell to the Grande Dame of Arab American Social History: Reflections on My Debt to Alixa Naff

Among the many ways to pay tribute to the life and legacy of Dr. Alixa Naff, mine is best expressed as personal reflections on how her friendship and collaboration shaped my career and the emerging field of Arab American studies.My entree into the ethnic arena began in the mid-1970s at the American University of Beirut (AUB). As a graduate student in AUB's new program of Middle East Studies, I was introduced to the history and sociology of the region, which indirectly drew my attention to the major emigration from Greater Syria to the USA that began a century earlier. As a third-generation Arab American, I was curious about the social, economic, and religious integration into the USA of the early Arabic-speaking immigrants, and chose, almost by accident, an English-language literary journal published by Salloum Mokarzel (my maternal grandfather) in the 1920s. The Syrian World was dedicated to the American-born children of Syrian immigrants to foster appreciation of and pride in their cultural heritage, and also to encourage national dialogue about the process of becoming American.A decade earlier, in the summer of 1962, Alixa Naff-armed with a history degree from University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), a tape recorder, and a grant from the university's Folklore Department-set out to collect oral histories of Arab Americans. Her sojourn into the American heartland to capture memories and collect artifacts of the first generation of Arabic-speaking immigrants (1880-1940) set Alixa on a lifelong path of documenting, contextualizing, and preserving the stories of these pioneers.By the time I was completing my master's thesis on the structural and ideological transition of immigrant families from this first wave, there was a burgeoning interest, mostly among American scholars of Arab descent, in the experience of Arab American communities. American attention to race and ethnicity, both in academe and popular culture, was expanding to include groups too small or too invisible (or both) to have warranted the focus of scholarship. Ethnic journals and monograph senes began including content on Arab Americans, itself a relatively new identity, fueled by increasing numbers of immigrants from the newly independent Arab states whose political, cultural, and religious experiences often differed from those of the pioneers, and laid the bases for new ethnic institutions and social formations that were more engaged in the public square.When Alixa returned in the 1980s to the communities she first visited to formalize her research (and the collection of artifacts that would comprise the archive she donated to the National Museum of American History in 1984), Arab American identity had taken root by way of national organizations, networks in support of Palestinian rights, and professional associations that drew largely from American-educated Arabs, but also from the more politicized segments of the pioneer wave's second and third generations. My own induction in the field of Arab American affairs was shaped more by my exposure to the contemporary Middle East and the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, learning Arabic, and by membership in organizations such as the Association of Arab American University Graduates (AAUG) than by the history of my immigrant forbears or the ethnic patrimony they left behind.Reading Alixa's book Becoming American: The Early Arab Immigrant Experience, meeting her professionally and being exposed to the Naff collection were unexpected sources of joy. The curiosity nurtured by my graduate years of poring over six years of The Syrian World and imagining my parents' generation's struggle with traditionalism, national identity, ignorance, and xenophobia was reignited by Alixa's seminal work. Alixa encouraged me to locate family photos and artifacts for the Arab American archive. My ethnic professional life, steeped in politics, intolerance, and the needs of modern-day immigrants, was tempered and soothed by taking time to focus on personal history, looking back through a prism of intimacy and wonder. …

A Structural Theory of Multilateral Asymmetric Strategies: China's Strategies towards its Neighbours before 1982

Under what conditions would a great power adopt a general strategy or selective strategies towards multiple weaker targets? This article seeks to answer the question through conceptual, theoretical, and empirical contributions. First, the essay discusses the conceptual significance of general and selective strategies in multilateral asymmetry. Second, the conventional wisdom suggests that external threats and domestic politics explain a great power’s foreign policy. Such theories may indeed explain certain types of foreign policy, but this article raises a structural theory to account for a great power’s multilateral asymmetric strategies, wherein regional structures and alignment relationships best explain the particular type of a great power’s foreign conduct. Third, the essay challenges the conventional wisdom whereby US–Soviet bipolarity in Cold War Europe was applicable to Cold War Asia. Based upon newly available Chinese, Russian, and American archives, China’s consistent behaviour in maritime East Asia and Indochina (1949–1982) demonstrates the virtues of a structural theory, and exposes the limits of alternative explanations.

Superpower Agency and the 1973 Arab-Israeli War

One of the key challenges for scholars studying U.S. and Soviet power in the Third World has been to account for the agency of non-Western actors. In episodes ranging from Vietnam to Afghanistan, the Americans and Soviets found themselves hamstrung in small wars, fighting seemingly inferior opponents that were nevertheless able to block or at least complicate superpower ambitions. How much agency should historians assign to Third World actors, small states, and nonstate groups? It might be argued that during the Cold War, local players made their own history, but they did not always do so under circumstances of their choosing; rather, they did it under circumstances and structures created by the superpowers. By connecting the superpower politics of détente to the local dynamics of the Arab–Israeli conflict, Craig Daigle’s book offers a bold defense of superpower agency. The book focuses on the origins of the 1973 Arab–Israeli War, casting the regional story through the lens of the Cold War. Daigle’s core argument is that superpower détente helped to set the stage for war between Egypt, Syria, and Israel. The war was thus a “consequence of détente” (p. 331). During the same time that superpower rapprochement sought to reduce tensions between Moscow and Washington, Daigle explains, it threatened to freeze a fundamentally unacceptable status quo in the Middle East, leaving leaders in Cairo and Damascus with no other recourse than to go to war against Israeli military forces occupying Egyptian and Syrian territory. Cold War détente helped to produce an untenable stalemate in Egyptian–Israeli relations. Daigle’s time in the Office of the Historian at the U.S. Department of State is on display throughout. The author has mined the American archives to produce the best-documented account of U.S. policy toward the Egyptian–Israeli rivalry in the immediate run-up to the 1973 war.

Ashes of Hama: the Muslim Brotherhood in Syria

When the convulsions of the Arab Spring first became manifest in Syria in March 2011, the Ba'athist regime was quick to blame the pro- tests on the 'Syrian Muslim Brotherhood' and its 'al-Qaeda affiliates.' But who are these Islamists so determined to rule a post-Assad Syria? Little has been published on militant Islam in Syria since Hafez Assad's regime destroyed the Islamist movement in its stronghold of Hama in February 1982. This book bridges that gap by providing readers with the first comprehensive account of the Syrian Muslim Brotherhood's history to date. In this ground-breaking account of Syria's most prominent, yet highly secretive, Islamist organisation, the author draws on previously untapped sources: the memoirs of former Syrian jihadists; British and American archives; and also a series of wide-ranging interviews with the Syrian Muslim Brotherhood's historical leaders as well as those who battled against them - many speaking on the record for the first time. Ashes of Hama uncovers the major aspects of the Islamist struggle: from the Brotherhood's radicalisation and its 'jihad' against the Ba'athist regime and subsequent exile, to a spectacular comeback at the forefront of the Syrian revolution in 2011 - a remarkable turnaround for an Islamist movement which all analysts had pronounced dead amid the ruins of Hama in 1982.