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FBIS

It's October 1962. Two large countries are fighting over a very small part of the world. The Cuban Missile Crisis comes immediately to mind but there was a simultaneous clash over 8,000 miles away at...

Readex is excited to announce the release of BBC Monitoring: Summary of World Broadcasts, 1939-2001. Created in partnership with the BBC and digitized from the complete physical materials archive preserved at the BBC Written Archives Centre in Reading, England, this exceptional resource captures more than 60 years of turbulent 20th century global history, as it unfolded.

The story reads like a tale from a 1930s pulp fiction magazine: A cross-dressing Manchu princess makes a daring a nighttime escape by horseback across the steppes, becomes a spy for the Japanese...

Take a day, and walk around. Watch the Nazis run your town. Then go home and check yourself. You think we’re singing about someone else. — Frank Zappa, “Plastic People” Czechoslovakia’s 1989 Velvet...

Readers of Mao Tse-tung’s ubiquitous “Little Red Book” of quotations have to wait until Chapter 6 until they make the acquaintance of Anna Louise Strong, the American journalist who elicited from...

At the confluence of the period of racial violence known as Red Summer (1919) and the first Red Scare (1917-1920), Jamaica-born poet and journalist Claude McKay merged black anger with radical...

Fifty years ago the North Vietnamese launched the Tet Offensive, a multi-pronged military campaign that underscored South Vietnamese President Nguyen Van Thieu’s inability to protect his country’s...

The “Bridge of No Return” doesn’t look like much today: four waist-high blue bollards at the eastern end stand guard over grass growing through the cracked roadway. A weathered sign reads, “Military...

Pearl S. Buck inhabited many roles over the course of her life. Following the publication of her bestselling novel The Good Earth in 1931 she was widely known as a writer who crafted a compelling...

The aims of the Committee of Liberation of the Peoples of Russia are: the overthrow of Stalin’s tyranny, the liberation of the peoples of Russia from the Bolshevik system, and the restitution of those...

In 1967 author and journalist Eugene Lyons published an article in the Washington Evening Star under the headline, “Freedom Came to Russians on this Day 50 Years Ago.” A bit of math would place that...

Consider for a moment the plight of Indonesia’s leaders in 1945: how to establish a national identity in a country spread across more than 13,000 islands, featuring hundreds of languages and ethnic...

“Write what you know,” goes the dictum. Thus from Russian author Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn we have among many other works the following: One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich—forced labor camps First...

From 1941 to 1996 the U.S. government published the Daily Report of the Foreign Broadcast Information Service (FBIS). FBIS was begun in 1941 as a means of letting the government know what propaganda...

It was January 1990, and I looked out my dorm window at the snow falling, yet again. Forecasters were calling for nine more inches, adding to the foot already on the ground. Winter in upstate New York...

Nearly a quarter century ago, Glenda J. Pearson, University of Washington, wrote: “The definition between government document and nongovernment document blurs, particularly as the intelligence...

Kim Philby on USSR commemorative stamp In “ Just Browsing: Cool Items from the Past,” I shared several unexpected items I recently stumbled upon in America’s Historical Newspapers. I don’t however...

Hassan al-Banna Founded in Egypt in 1928 by Hassan al-Banna, the Muslim Brotherhood these days is more often mentioned in the news than ever before as the current political crisis in Egypt continues...

Buried among the verbiage of a lengthy speech by Nikita Khrushchev from 1960 is a Communist Party plan that I’d never heard before – that the Soviet Union would abolish taxes on workers and employees...

John Calvert’s forthcoming book Sayyid Qutb and the Origins of Radical Islamism (London: Hurst & Co., 2010) was anonymously and seemingly fairly reviewed in The Economist, July 15, 2010. Qutb...