Loosing the Bonds: The United States and South Africa in the Apartheid Years

Voorkant
Nan A. Talese/Doubleday, 1997 - 896 pagina's
"Loosing the Bonds is popular, narrative history at its best: a consuming, dramatically told David and Goliath story about the moral power of justice triumphing over powerful forces of oppression.


Apartheid-the brutal enforcement of racial segregation by South Africa's white government--became official policy in post-World War II South Africa, coinciding with the rise of the civil-rights movement in the United States. From the Kennedy administration on, Washington spoke against apartheid but, pressured by American corporations making big profits in South Africa and the geopolitics of the cold war, did little to foster change. Anti-apartheid activists turned their attention instead to South Africa's Achilles heel: its economy. Soon institutional America-churches, foundations, union and government pension funds-joined activists and college students in pressuring American business to get out of South Africa. Their efforts built to a climax in the 1980s, when South Africa became the burning issue of the day, the United States imposed punitive sanctions, and the apartheid regime collapsed.


Robert Kinloch Massie re-creates the passions and struggles of these years, deftly showing how American and South African politics, money and personalities were intertwined in these years. Populated with real-life heroes and villains, bursting with colorful incident, "Loosing the Bonds is an inspiring chronicle of one of the most important struggles of our lifetime.

Vanuit het boek

Inhoudsopgave

ONE Rival Dreams of Nationhood
3
THREE John F Kennedy and the Politics of Racial Equality
97
SIX Confrontations with General Motors 1971
263
Copyright

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Over de auteur (1997)

Robert Kinloch Massie III (1929-) is an American historian, author, Pulitzer Prize recipient. He has devoted much of his career to studying the House of Romanov, Russia's royal family from 1613-1917. Massie was born in Lexington, Kentucky. He spent much of his youth in Nashville, Tennessee and currently resides in the village of Irvington, New York. He studied United States and modern European history at Yale and Oxford University, respectively, on a Rhodes Scholarship. Massie went to work as a journalist for Newsweek from 1959 to 1962 and then took a position at the Saturday Evening Post. In 1969 he wrote and published his breakthrough book, Nicholas and Alexandra. Massie was the president of the Authors Guild from 1987 to 1991, and he still serves as a council member. While president of the Guild, he famously called on authors to boycott any store refusing to carry Salman Rushdie's The Satanic Verses. His title Catherine the Great: Portrait of a Woman made The New York Times Best Seller List for 2012.

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