Assassination Plots Research Articles

Relayed Revolutionary Sentiment: Chinese Appropriation of Russian Nihilism in Popular Literature

ABSTRACT This article examines the relay translation of William Tufnell Le Queux’s (1864–1927) Strange Tales of a Nihilist, which the prominent Chinese translator of nihilist fiction, Chen Jinghan 陳景韓 (1878–1965), completed based on Matsui Shōyō’s 松居松葉 (1870–1933) Japanese rendering. By exploring the transcultural process through which a story of Russian nihilism traveled from Europe to East Asia, the author tests the translatability of the revolutionary structure of feeling across different cultures. The author reveals how English and Japanese media and literature inspired Chinese interpretations of Russian nihilism, and how a key Chinese translator channeled his own revolutionary commitments through intensive borrowing of traditional Chinese literary motifs and narrative devices. As a result, the Chinese vision of nihilism diverged from nihilism’s Russian political connotations and was assimilated into a thrilling cultural topos of vengeful assassination plots in Chinese popular culture. Ultimately, this transculturation of revolutionary sentimental, which aroused sinicized emotions of love and revenge, not only generated public sympathy for nihilists in China but also motivated Chinese revolutionary actions.

Raising Malcolm’s Ghost: Black Radicalism, Third World Internationalism, and Counterintelligence in Lauren Wilkinson’s American Spy

ABSTRACT This article considers the “warring ideals” (Du Bois, Souls of Black Folks) of Black American solidarity with Third World Internationalism and complicity in U.S. imperialism through a reading of Lauren Wilkinson’s American Spy (2019). The novel, a spy thriller, centers on the life and experience of Marie Mitchell, a Black woman FBI agent recruited by the CIA to further an assassination plot against Thomas Sankara, the charismatic socialist leader of Burkina Faso. The story puts individual career advancement in the service of American imperialism in direct tension with the larger collectivist goals of Black and Third World liberation. Thus, the novel invites an exploration of the geopolitical implications of Du Bois’s famous formulation about Black American double consciousness, a formulation most often considered solely as a matter of individual psychology.

The Bulgarian connection: the Young Turks in exile and the making of radicalism in Ottoman Europe, 1895–1897

AbstractFocusing on the years between 1895 and 1897, this article reconstructs what happened after the arrival of Young Turk revolutionaries into the cities of the Danubian hinterland, particularly centering on Rusçuk (Ruse in today’s Bulgaria). In tracing the footsteps of İbrahim Temo and Mustafa Ragıp, two self-exiled figures from İstanbul, this study captures a particular moment when the Danubian cities became the hotbed of transnational radicalism, as a number of assassination plots began to be hatched by Muslim revolutionaries. A well-connected port city serviced by regular steamship links, Rusçuk was where professional revolutionaries met with the local Muslims, much to the ire of Ottoman diplomats in the region. In capturing their encounters, the goal is to point to the significance of Young Turk activities in the Balkans before the turn of the century, a phase which remains understudied in the existing literature. By focusing on a secondary port city that became home to failed assassination plots, this article also seeks to contribute to ongoing discussion in global history that warns against narratives of unhindered globalization. In studying fin-de-siecle radicalization, I hope to contribute to these debates by reflecting upon the limits of globalization as a productive field of historical inquiry.

McTague, John. Things That Didn’t Happen: Writing, Politics and the Counterhistorical, 1678–1743.

McTague, John. <i>Things That Didn’t Happen: Writing, Politics and the Counterhistorical, 1678–1743</i>.

African Modernism in America, 1947–1967

African Modernism in America, 1947–1967

Nerve Agents’ Surrogates: Invaluable Tools for Development of Acetylcholinesterase Reactivators

The use of nerve agents as warfare and in terrorist acts has drawn much attention from the governments and societies. Such toxic organophosphorus compounds are listed in Chemical Weapons Convention as Schedule 1 chemicals. The discussion about the chemical identity of the elusive Novichok agents, more potent compounds than best known G- and V-Agents, which have been implicated in recent rumorous assassination plots, clearly demonstrating the importance of the matter. Furthermore, accidents with pesticides or misuse thereof have been a pressing issue in many countries. In this context, the continued development of novel cholinesterase reactivators, antidotes for organophosphorus poisoning, a rather restricted class of pharmaceutical substances, is warranted. Testing of novel candidates may require use of actual nerve agents. Nonetheless, only a few laboratories comply with the requirements for storing, possession and manipulation of such toxic chemicals. To overcome such limitations, nerve agents’ surrogates may be a useful alternative, as they undergo the same reaction with cholinesterases, yielding similar adducts, allowing assays with novel antidote candidates, among other applications.

Obama In Havana: Success and Failure in American Cuba Policy During the Obama Years

Conflict, abortive invasion, assassination plots, and embargo defined American-Cuban relations for much of the second half of the 20th century. The 21st century, however, has produced incredible progress in relations between the two countries, although much of this progress has been undone. In this paper, I examine the history of relations between Castro-led Cuba and the United States, then take a deep-dive in to Barack Obama's policies towards the communist country. Towards the end, I discuss whether or not these policies were a success or failure, and what the ramifications of a successful American policy in Cuba would mean to each country.

Military Duties and an Assassination Plot: The Extra Dimension Found in Ancient Egyptian Letters

Military Duties and an Assassination Plot: The Extra Dimension Found in Ancient Egyptian Letters

Conspiracy theories before and after the Greek crisis: Discursive patterns and political use of the “enemy” theme

Conspiracy theories have been associated to a paranoid way of thinking; however they are not always marginal and utterly irrational. Conspiracist narratives reflect rival strategies of interpretation, and can have a real impact on the social and political praxis. More than factual accuracy, I suggest that what distinguishes a conspiracy theory is a type of discourse, its key features being: suspicion, intentionality, personification, speculation and denunciation.This paper examines conspiracy theories that dominated Greek public discourse before and after the economic crisis of the years 2010s, particularly those introduced by political actors as a means of political persuasion and mobilisation. Greek political culture and the discredit of the political system since 2010 led to frequent expressions of distrust towards political elites and foreign “powers”. My analysis focuses on the acceptability of conspiracy theories in relation with social representations, dominant stereotypes and widely shared interpretative schemata.The following cases of conspiracy theories are discussed: a) the wildfires that ravaged large parts of Greece in 2007, supposedly set by “foreign agents”; b) the alleged assassination plot in 2008-2009 against the PM Karamanlis by Western / US secret services; c) the conspiracy theories attributing the economic crisis to a deliberate foreign plot against Greece. The paper examines in particular the attribution of blame to presumed “enemies”, in line with nationalist discursive themes and stereotypes.

Japanese Imperialism’s Kim Gu Assassination Plot and Spies

Japanese Imperialism’s Kim Gu Assassination Plot and Spies

Telling a tale with the names changed: contemporary comparisons of the Rye House Plot to the 1696 Assassination Plot

When a Jacobite plot to assassinate William III was discovered in 1696, supporters of William and his whig-dominated ministry pointed out similarities between this Assassination Plot and the 1683 Rye House Plot against Charles II. Embodying the links between the plots in these accounts was Robert Ferguson, a notorious radical whig who had become a Jacobite active in writing and plotting against King William. Representing the 1683 and 1696 plots as equivalent allowed establishment whigs to distance themselves from pre-revoutionary whig plotting, while portraying the Jacobites as representing a radicalism willing to use rebellion and regicide to achieve its goals.

Unequal partners in crime: masters, slaves and free people of color in Santo Domingo, c.1600–1650

ABSTRACTIn the early seventeenth century, important socioeconomic changes in the Spanish colony of Hispaniola brought about substantial shifts in race relations between white residents and peoples of African descent, who were enslaved and free. As the plantation system declined precipitously, white members of the Spanish elite started envisioning new roles for enslaved laborers, which included enrolling these enslaved peoples in their own intrigues against other elites. This cooperation led people in bondage to carry out violent attacks and assassination plots against other members of the white colonial society. People of African descent took advantage of these collaborations as an opportunity to advance their own interests within the community. Nevertheless, people of African descent faced fierce and often violent backlash if they acted of their own accord.

Anti-imperial metropolis: interwar Paris and the seeds of Third World nationalism

This book traces the spread of a global anti-imperialism from the vantage point of Paris between the two World Wars, where countless future leaders of Third World countries spent formative stints. Exploring the local social context in which these emergent activists moved, the study delves into assassination plots allegedly hatched by Chinese students, demonstrations by Latin American nationalists, and the everyday lives of Algerian, Senegalese and Vietnamese workers. On the basis of police reports and other primary sources, the book foregrounds the role of migration and interaction as driving forces enabling challenges to the imperial world order, weaving together the stories of peoples of three continents. Drawing on the scholarship of twentieth-century imperial, international and global history as well as migration, race and ethnicity in France, it ultimately proposes a new understanding of the roots of the Third World idea.

TheBal des Ardents(1393), Thomas of Woodstock (1397), and Richard II (1400): Three Medieval Conspiracy Rumours and the Scots’ Mine Play (1608)

Assassination vehicles in Elizabethan and Jacobean tragedies sometimes involve meta-theatrical court festival massacres: court performances embedded within full-length drama, resulting in violent death or trauma to characters in the play. During his career as a playwright (c. 1600-08), John Marston pioneered the masquerade-within as a popular subcategory of court festival massacre. Were such underhand festival appropriations wholly inspired by stage precedents? Or did they also occur in real life? Whether its deaths were accidental or resulted from a botched assassination plot, the 1393 Bal des Ardents was hugely culturally and politically influential. My researches identify the conspiracy rumours encouraged in the wake of the 1393 Paris disaster and two English conspiracies of 1397 and 1400 linked to court festivals, as key to a fresh approach to the meta-theatrical court festival massacre, and to interpretation of two plays traditionally discussed together, which refer to these English conspiracies, Shakespeare’s Richard II and the anonymous Thomas of Woodstock. My analysis supports a post-Elizabethan dating of Woodstock, and encourages the hypothesis that it could be the so-called Scots’ Mine Play of 1608, the lost Jacobean play thought by some to have ended Marston’s career as a playwright.

Reframing “official memory”: Don DeLillo’s Libra and the House Select Committee on Assassinations

Critics have examined DeLillo’s appropriation of The Warren Commission Report in Libra , but the novel responds to more than this fundamental document of the assassination archive. Libra should also be situated within the investigations into the activities of the CIA in the 1970s. These investigations conducted by the Rockefeller Commission, the Church Committee, and the Pike Committee provide the historical background crucial for comprehending DeLillo’s fictional intervention into the lingering JFK assassination controversy. These investigations also spawned the House Select Committee on Assassinations in 1976, whose work leaves “the blank spaces in the known record” (457) that Libra attempts to fill, primarily Lee Harvey Oswald’s connections to American intelligence and the secret war against Castro. In doing so, Libra provides a summary of the very real efforts of the CIA to overthrow Castro, from the joint CIA-Mafia assassination plots and the Bay of Pigs invasion to Operation Mongoose.

Terrorist: Gavrilo Princip, the Assassin Who Ignited World War I by Henrik Rehr (review)

Reviewed by: Terrorist: Gavrilo Princip, the Assassin Who Ignited World War I by Henrik Rehr Elizabeth Bush Rehr, Henrik Terrorist: Gavrilo Princip, the Assassin Who Ignited World War I; written and illus. by Henrik Rehr. Graphic Universe, 2015 231p Library ed. ISBN 978-1-4677-7279-2 $33.32 Paper ed. ISBN 978-1-4677-7284-6 $11.99 R Gr. 9-12 The confluence of World War I centennial commemorations and a flourishing market for graphic novels has already produced the brilliantly illustrated Trench Poets collection Above the Dreamless Dead (BCCB 11/14). Now this fictional exploration reconstructs the life of Serbian nationalist Gavrilo Princip, organizer of a cabal to assassinate Archduke Franz Ferdinand (heir apparent to the Hapsburg throne) and the man who fired the fatal bullet. Rehr portrays Princip as a serious, impressionable boy, raised on stories of victories and defeats of his ancestors, and radicalized among anarchists in Belgrade during a chaotic period in which Serbs were politically and militarily squeezed between Austro-Hungarians to the north and Turks to the South. Rehr also pays heed to the philosophical underpinnings of Princip’s adherence to anarchism, a bonus for teen readers who appreciate some intellectual heft in their GNs. Even young adults who skim past the kitchen table and coffeehouse political discussions, however, will be drawn in as Princip methodically strips his life of ephemeral relationships (including his attachment to a young woman he once loved) and dedicates himself to becoming an avenging hero [End Page 512] for the Serbian people. Black and white artwork, grainy and hatched to resemble etching, moves skillfully between Princip’s life and that of Franz Ferdinand and his wife, who, despite warnings of an assassination plot, drive willingly and directly to their death. Particularly affecting is Rehr’s segue into the war itself; a series of potent images highlight not only the violence of the battlefields, but the suffering that lingered in its aftermath. End matter includes a map of Europe just before World War I, and an afterword discussing Rehr’s interest in Princip. Source notes are not included. Copyright © 2015 The Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois

Of Empresses and Indians

Of Empresses and Indians

Of Empresses and Indians

Of Empresses and Indians

La profetiza Casandra y el leño de Meleagro by Pablo Polop y Valdés (review)

Polop y Valdes, Pablo. La profetiza Casandra y el leno de Meleagro. Ed. Arturo Echavarren. Pamplona: Iberoamericana/Universidad de Navarra, 2012. 320 pp.Arturo Echavarren's edition of Pablo Polop y Valdes's Xa profetiza Casandra y el leno de Meleagro (1685) provides scholars with a thorough introductory study, of nearly 150 pages, of this play written by one of the lesser-known playwrights of seventeenth-century Spain. Until now, the work had been found in only two manuscript versions, and no substantial critical attention had been given to it. Echavarren's introduction begins with a discussion of La profetizaos categorization as a mythological zarzuela. As a zarzuela, the play holds its historical place amongst those early experimental works in which playwrights began blending theater, song, and dance to create an innovative form of musical drama; as a mythological play, it boasts all the special effects and spectacle that gained this genre its popularity during the late seventeenth century in Spain. Furthermore, the play shows Polop's ability to combine two distinct myths into one story, a technique made popular by Calderon.Indeed, as the title reveals, La profetiza weaves the myths of Cassandra and Meleager. In the section titled Fiesta para una reina francesa en tiempos aciagos, Echavarren engages the reader's attention with his meticulous description of the difficult political relations between Spain and France during the second half of the seventeenth century to explain the Valencian playwright's choice of connecting the tales of these two characters. Of particular interest is his analysis of the hostile anti-French reactions that came forth at the Spanish court when King Carlos II married the French Maria Luisa de Orleans. Such sentiments fueled scandals, controversies, and even assassination plots in which the new queen was accused of taking part. It is here within this suspicious and Francophobie context that Echavarren understands Polop's decision to bring the myths of Cassandra and Meleager together. By incorporating Meleager, a character virtually unknown in Spain but popular in France, Echavarren believes that Polop wanted to appeal to Maria Luisa's artistic sensibilities and to honor her cultural tradition. Regarding the mythical prophetess, however, he believes Polop goes much further than simple flattery. In effect, by making the crux of the play Cassandra's defense of her innocence against Apollo's amorous advances, Echavarren believes Polop conscientiously draws a parallel between Cassandra's heroic story and Maria Luisa's struggle against false claims while at the Spanish court. …

The Jackson County War: Reconstruction and Resistance in Post–Civil War Florida by Daniel R. Weinfeld (review)

Reviewed by: The Jackson County War: Reconstruction and Resistance in Post–Civil War Florida by Daniel R. Weinfeld Learotha Williams Jr. The Jackson County War: Reconstruction and Resistance in Post–Civil War Florida. Daniel R. Weinfeld. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2012. ISBN 978-0-8173-1745-4, 224 pp., cloth, $29.95. Daniel R. Weinfeld’s The Jackson County War: Reconstruction and Resistance in Post–Civil War Florida, examines a topic with which many scholars and students of Florida history will be familiar: the bloodshed and wanton loss of life in Jackson County during the early days of the state’s reconstruction. Historians seeking to better understand Reconstruction and the use of terror to subjugate freed persons in the Sunshine State have discussed at length the tragic events of the period. William Watson Davis’s Civil War and Reconstruction in Florida and John Wallace’s Carpetbag Rule in Florida were two of the earliest efforts to chronicle and interpret the violence in the [End Page 549] Middle Florida county, and during the twentieth century, historians Joe M. Richardson, Jerrell Shofner, Richard Peek, Canter Brown, and others actively engaged the county’s violent past. Indeed, the assassination plots, murders, victims, as well as the names of those responsible for the violence have been a well-documented part of the state’s history for more than a century. Through his meticulous research, Weinfeld successfully presents the reader with the most detailed biographical sketches of many of the major participants in the violent era to date. In addition to an excellent discussion of the events of the period, the author provides new insight into the strengths and flaws of the many politicians who dominated Florida politics during Reconstruction. Weinfeld begins The Jackson County War with a discussion of the peaceful character of the county prior to the Civil War and how Union victory ushered in dramatic economic and social change for the area’s black and white population. The book emphasizes that neither segment of the population fully comprehended the changes the war wrought, the most important being African American emancipation. Against this backdrop, Weinfeld introduces the two men whom many in Jackson County blamed for their problems with the African American population, Freedmen’s Bureau agents Charles Hamilton and William J. Purman. Weinfeld then proceeds to discuss the period from the defeat of the Confederacy to the end of violence in the county in 1871. The author presents the reader with a history of how the violence evolved from isolated random individual acts of racial violence to a more organized group violence fueled by political as well as racial impulses. By the book’s end, Weinfield demonstrates that many of the chief perpetrators of the violence not only escaped punishment for the lawless acts, but benefited economically, socially, and politically for them. Historians with interests in the history of African Americans in Florida will find Weinfeld wrestles with many of the same obstacles they have faced in studying free persons during this period, chief among them a scarcity of first-person accounts from African Americans who survived the era. The author uses testimony from congressional investigation of the Ku Klux Klan activity in the South, court cases, and newspaper articles to recount what life was like for African Americans living in Jackson County and how they responded to the murders and violence that became a common feature of their lives during Reconstruction. Although the author weaves a very powerful narrative of what the group faced in Jackson County—with the exception of prominent African American politician Emanuel Fortune and the County’s African American justice of the peace, Calvin Rogers—outside of being targets of violence, African Americans as a group appear to occupy only secondary roles in the drama, despite comprising half of Jackson County’s postwar population. The murder of Maggie McClellan described in the book’s introduction was likely in retaliation for a failed assassination attempt that resulted in the death of a small African American child, but it does not become clear that the suspected perpetrator was the actual target until later in the work. Readers will very likely leave this book understanding that further scrutiny of...