Search results for ""author jad adams""

The pre-eminent political and spiritual leader of India's independence movement, pioneer of non-violent resistance to tyranny through mass civil disobedience (satyagraha), honoured in India as 'father of nation', Mohandas K. Gandhi has inspired movements for civil rights and political freedom across the world. Jad Adams offers a concise and elegant account of Gandhi's life: from his birth and upbringing in a small princely state in Gujarat during the high noon of the British Raj, to his assassination at the hands of a Hindu extremist in 1948 only months after the birth of the independent India which he himself he had done so much to bring about. He delineates the principal events of a career that may truly be said to have changed the world: his training as a barrister in late Victorian London; his civil rights work in Boer War-era South Africa; his leadership of the Indian National Congress; his focus on obtaining self-government and control of all Indian government institutions, and the campaigns of non-cooperation and non-violence against British rule in India whereby he sought to achieve that aim (including the famous 'Salt March' of March/April 1930); his passionate opposition to partition in 1947 and his fasts-unto-death in a bid to end the bitter and bloody sectarian violence that attended it. Jad Adams's accessible and thoughtful biography not only traces the outline of an extraordinary life with exemplary clarity, but also examines why Mahatma Gandhi and his teachings are still profoundly relevant today.

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During the 1890s, British women for the first time began to leave their family homes to seek work, accommodation, and financial and sexual freedom. Decadent Women is an account of some of these women who wrote for the innovative art and literary journal The Yellow Book. For the first time, based on original research, Jad Adams describes the lives and work of these vibrant and passionate women, from well-connected and fashionable aristocrats to the desperately poor. He narrates the challenges they faced in a literary marketplace, and within a society that overwhelmingly favoured men, showing how they were pioneers of a new style, living lives of lurid adventure and romance, as well as experiencing poverty, squalor, disease and unwanted pregnancy.

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Before 1893 no woman anywhere in the world had the vote in a national election. A hundred years later almost all countries had enfranchised women, and it was a sign of backwardness not to have done so. This is the story of how this momentous change came about. The first genuinely global history of women and the vote, it takes the story of women in politics from the earliest times to the present day, revealing startling new connections across time and national boundaries - from Europe and North America to Asia, Africa, Latin America, and the Muslim world post-9/11. A story of individuals as well as of wider movements, it includes the often dramatic life-stories of women's suffrage pioneers from across the world, painting vivid biographical portraits of everyone from Susan B. Anthony and the Pankhursts to hitherto lesser-known activists in China, Latin America, and Africa. It is also the first major post-feminist history of women's struggle for the vote. Controversially, Jad Adams rejects the widely accepted idea that success was primarily a result of the pressure group politics of the suffragists and their supporters. Ultimately, he argues, it was nationalism, not feminism, that was the most important factor in winning women the vote.

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