Books in the New Press People's History series

Here, from a brilliant young writer, is a paradigm-shifting history of both a utopian concept and global movementthe idea of the Third World. The Darker Nations traces the intellectual origins and the political history of the twentieth century attempt to knit together the worlds impoverished countries in opposition to the United States and Soviet spheres of influence in the decades following World War II.Spanning every continent of the global South, Vijay Prashads fascinating narrative takes us from the birth of postcolonial nations after World War II to the downfall and corruption of nationalist regimes. A breakthrough book of cutting-edge scholarship, it includes vivid portraits of Third World giants like Indias Nehru, Egypts Nasser, and Indonesias Sukarnoas well as scores of extraordinary but now-forgotten intellectuals, artists, and freedom fighters. The Darker Nations restores to memory the vibrant though flawed idea of the Third World, whose demise, Prashad ultimately argues, has produced a much impoverished international political arena.

The best single-volume history of the Revolution I have read.Howard ZinnThe first major effort to tell the history of the American Revolution from the often overlooked standpoints of its everyday participants, A Peoples History of the American Revolution is a highly accessible narrative of the wartime experience that brings in the stories of previously marginalized voices: the common people, slave and free, who made up the majority in eighteenth-century America.This first volume in The New Press Peoples History Series skillfully weaves diaries, personal letters, and other long-overlooked primary source material into the historical narrative. The result is a remarkable first-person perspective on the events leading up to and during the war. With a simple shift of the focus of historys lensaway from Revolutionary leaders such as George Washington and Thomas Jefferson and on to the slaves they owned, the Indians they displaced, and the men and boys who did the fightingauthor Ray Raphael brings us a true peoples history of the Revolutionary experience.