Bøger udgivet af Stanford University Press

"In the immediate aftermath of its successful revolution, Cuba was heralded by socialist nations as the vanguard of communism in Latin America in the early 1960s. But by the late 1980s, Cuba's inability to adopt the modes of socialist planning and Mikhail Gorbachev's reforms had deeply soured the relationship between Havana and the Soviet-led Socialist Bloc. While secondary literature often highlights Cuba's political and economic relations with Washington and Moscow, Havana's ideological, political, and economic relations with the East European states have received considerably less attention. This book aims to fill this gap by offering a detailed chronological account of how Cuba's post-revolutionary development was influenced by East European diplomats. Outside of their roles as representatives of their respective states, East European diplomats were entrusted with the task of educating local Cuban leadership in the intricacies of Marxism-Leninism, steering Cuba's governors onto the "correct path of development," helping them eradicate "erroneous ideas" of economic development, and showing them the validity of socialist "morals and ideology." By considering these developments and analyzing firsthand accounts of East European diplomats' experiences in Havana, historian Radoslav Yordanov reconstructs the thinking of East European diplomats and specialists in their dealings with Cuba from the 1960s to the 1991 dissolution of the Soviet Union, shedding new light on Cuba's role in the global Cold War"--

"The civilian role in managing the military has never been more important. Today, civilian leadership of defense policy is challenged by the blurring line between war and competition and the speed of machine decision-making on the battlefield. Moreover, the legitimacy of political leaders and civil servants has been undermined by a succession of foreign policy failures and by imbalances of public faith in the military on the one hand and disapproval of civilian institutions on the other. A central question emerges: What does appropriate and effective civilian control of the military look like? Combining scholarly expertise and firsthand civilian experience in the Department of Defense, Friend argues that civilians combine authoritative status, political expertise, and institutional power to ensure that democratic preferences over the use of force prevail. With an historical and theoretical perspective, Friend compares the standards for civilian control of the military in the American system to cases of actual civilian control choices. Using case studies from the post-Cold War and post-9/11 periods, the book focuses on the ways political context shapes whether and how civilian controllers--the civilians in professional and institutional positions with the responsibility for defense matters--exercise control over the military and each other. Mightier Than the Sword provides insights that enrich civil-military relations scholarship, as well as lessons aimed to revitalize American democracy"--

J. E. Wallace Sterling was Stanford University's fifth president, serving from 1949 until 1968. During his presidency, Stanford evolved from a notable regional university into a leading national and eventually international university-developments in which Sterling played a critical part. Taking advantage of a postwar economic boom, federal interest in university research, and popular interest in higher education, Sterling championed robust fundraising, ambitious faculty recruitment, increasing selectivity in student admissions, and the construction of major new research facilities. This deeply researched historical study of Sterling's role at Stanford thus simultaneously illuminates a remarkable career in university leadership along with the development of one of America's top-ranked universities.This is not, however, a simple success story, but instead a nuanced exploration of experimentation, uncertainty, disagreement, leaps of faith, accommodation, and compromise-within the university as well as between the university and its alumni, neighbors, and the public. Although Stanford had survived the Depression and World War II better than many of its peers, it did so at the cost of seriously deferred maintenance, notoriously low faculty salaries and morale, inadequate scholarship support, and outdated labs and libraries. Favoring gradualism and pragmatism, Sterling drew faculty into university governance and long-term planning, building a strong and able administrative team. The result was a remarkable and steadily sustained rise in the university's fortunes, which survived the campus turmoil of the Vietnam War era along with significantly changed expectations on the part of students, faculty, parents, and the wider public.