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Using a variety of cases from history and today´s life, the book examines character attackers targeting the private lives, behavior, values, and identity of their victims. Numerous historical examples show that character assassination has always been a very effective weapon to win political battles or settle personal scores.

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Table of Contents Acknowledgements Introduction 1. Character Assassination: How Political Psychologists May Assist Historians; Eric Shiraev Ancient Rome 2. Character Attack and Invective Speech in the Roman Republic: Cicero as Target; Henriette van der Blom 3. Reports about the ´sexual life´ of early Roman emperors: A case of character assassination?; Jan Meister 4. Creating Tyrants in Ancient Rome: Character Assassination and Imperial Investiture; Martijn Icks 5. Editorial reflections: Ancient Rome The Middle Ages 6. Falsifying the Prophet: Muhammad at the Hands of his Earliest Christian Biographers in the West; Kenneth Wolf 7. Louis of Orléans, Isabeau of Bavaria, and the Burgundian Propaganda Machine, 1392-1407; Tracy Adams 8. A Newcomer in Defamatory Propaganda: Youth (Late Fourteenth to Early Fifteenth Century); Gilles Lecuppre 9. Editorial Reflections: Medieval Cases The Early Modern Age 10. The Ass in the Seat of St. Peter: Defamation of the Pope in early Lutheran Flugschriften; Bobbi Dykema 11. Odious and Vile Names: Political Character Assassination and Purging in the French Revolution; Mette Harder 12. Edwina Hagen 13. Editorial Reflections: Early Modern Cases The Modern Age 14. Character Attacks and American Presidents; Jason Smart and Eric Shiraev 15. The Gao-Rao Affair: A Case of Character Assassination in Chinese Politics in the 1950s; Eric Shiraev and Zi Yang 16. A Character Assassination Attempt: The Case of Václav Havel; Martina Klicperová-Baker 17. Editorial Reflections: Modern Cases Epilogue ?

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"The can be few pleasures more delicious than witnessing the savaging of the reputations of the great and the good. This volume treats us to a rich smorgasbord of notable defamations, from the Romans down to our own day. They are served up by experts who seek to inform and entertain us and who succeed at both." - Anthony Barrett, University of British Columbia, Canada

´This tightly knit volume is a major contribution to our understanding of the ugly side of modern politics. It historicises what appears to be a universal human trait across all political societies the tendency of politics to descend towards mudslinging and character assassination. It asks why character assassination is an attractive political strategy, when it is most effective, and how it can be resisted. It establishes the different strategies of attack and defence that have been used in conjunction with changing media and that apply in closed dictatorial and open democratic societies, and it also establishes why it is a particularly ubiquitous strategy in electoral politics. Perhaps not surprisingly, the volume demonstrates that victims also have more possible strategies of defence under democracies, but it also shows how under an unpopular regime such as the Czechoslovakian regime after 1968 denigration of dissidents such as Václav Havel and Charter 77 could backfire spectacularly.´ - Simon Burrows, University of Western Sydney, Australia

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