Title: Republican Beijing: the city and its histories
Author: Dong, Madeleine Yue 1964-
Published: University of California Press,  2003
Subjects: History | Asian History | China | Urban Studies
Publisher's Description: Old Beijing has become a subject of growing fascination in contemporary China since the 1980s. While physical remnants from the past are being bulldozed every day to make space for glass-walled skyscrapers and towering apartment buildings, nostalgia for the old city is booming. Madeleine Yue Dong offers the first comprehensive history of Republican Beijing, examining how the capital acquired its identity as a consummately "traditional" Chinese city. For residents of Beijing, the heart of the city lay in the labor-intensive activities of "recycling," a primary mode of material and cultural production and circulation that came to characterize Republican Beijing. An omnipresent process of recycling and re-use unified Beijing's fragmented and stratified markets into one circulation system. These material practices evoked an air of nostalgia that permeated daily life. Paradoxically, the "old Beijing" toward which this nostalgia was directed was not the imperial capital of the past, but the living Republican city. Such nostalgia toward the present, the author argues, was not an empty sentiment, but an essential characteristic of Chinese modernity.   [brief]
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Title: Adventures of a mathematician
Author: Ulam, Stanislaw M
Published: University of California Press,  1991
Subjects: History | History and Philosophy of Science | Mathematics | United States History
Publisher's Description: The autobiography of mathematician Stanislaw Ulam, one of the great scientific minds of the twentieth century, tells a story rich with amazingly prophetic speculations and peppered with lively anecdotes. As a member of the Los Alamos National Laboratory from 1944 on, Ulam helped to precipitate some of the most dramatic changes of the postwar world. He was among the first to use and advocate computers for scientific research, originated ideas for the nuclear propulsion of space vehicles, and made fundamental contributions to many of today's most challenging mathematical projects.With his wide-ranging interests, Ulam never emphasized the importance of his contributions to the research that resulted in the hydrogen bomb. Now Daniel Hirsch and William Mathews reveal the true story of Ulam's pivotal role in the making of the "Super," in their historical introduction to this behind-the-scenes look at the minds and ideas that ushered in the nuclear age. An epilogue by Françoise Ulam and Jan Mycielski sheds new light on Ulam's character and mathematical originality.   [brief]
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Title: Rethinking American history in a global age
Author: Bender, Thomas
Published: University of California Press,  2002
Subjects: History | United States History | Intellectual History | Historiography
Publisher's Description: In rethinking and reframing the American national narrative in a wider context, the contributors to this volume ask questions about both nationalism and the discipline of history itself. The essays offer fresh ways of thinking about the traditional themes and periods of American history. By locating the study of American history in a transnational context, they examine the history of nation-making and the relation of the United States to other nations and to transnational developments. What is now called globalization is here placed in a historical context. A cast of distinguished historians from the United States and abroad examines the historiographical implications of such a reframing and offers alternative interpretations of large questions of American history ranging from the era of European contact to democracy and reform, from environmental and economic development and migration experiences to issues of nationalism and identity. But the largest issue explored is basic to all histories: How does one understand, teach, and write a national history even as one recognizes that the territorial boundaries do not fully contain that history and that within that bounded territory the society is highly differentiated, marked by multiple solidarities and identities? Rethinking American History in a Global Age advances an emerging but important conversation marked by divergent voices, many of which are represented here. The various essays explore big concepts and offer historical narratives that enrich the content and context of American history. The aim is to provide a history that more accurately reflects the dimensions of American experience and better connects the past with contemporary concerns for American identity, structures of power, and world presence.   [brief]
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Title: Passions of the cut sleeve: the male homosexual tradition in China
Author: Hinsch, Bret
Published: University of California Press,  1990
Subjects: History | Asian History | China | GayLesbian and Bisexual Studies
Publisher's Description: The first detailed treatment of the Chinese homosexual tradition in any Western language, Passions of the Cut Sleeve shatters preconceptions and stereotypes. Gone is the image of the sternly puritanical Confucian as sole representative of Chinese sexual practices - and with it the justification for the modern Chinese insistence that homosexuality is a recent import from the decadent West. Rediscovering the male homosexual tradition in China provides a startling new perspective on Chinese society and adds richly to our understanding of homosexuality.Bret Hinsch's reconstruction of the Chinese homosexual past reveals unexpected scenes. An emperor on his deathbed turns over the seals of the empire to a male beloved; two men marry each other with elaborate wedding rituals; parents sell their son into prostitution. The tradition portrays men from all levels of society - emperors, transvestite actors, rapists, elegant scholars, licentious monks, and even the nameless poor.Drawing from dynastic histories, erotic novels, popular Buddhist tracts, love poetry, legal cases, and joke books, Passions of the Cut Sleeve evokes the complex and fascinating male homosexual tradition in China from the Bronze Age until its decline in recent times.   [brief]
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Title: Regionalism and change in the economy of independent Delos, 314-167 B.C 
Author: Reger, Gary
Published: University of California Press,  1994
Subjects: Classics | History | Archaeology | Economics and Business | Ancient History
Publisher's Description: Gary Reger's highly original book applies modern statistical analysis to the detailed inscriptions at the Temple of Apollo on Delos. These inscriptions, discovered during excavations in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, provide a wealth of information about the business and economic enterprises of the island from 314 to167 B.C.Reger examines the abundant data from the inscriptions and seeks patterns in the production and use of commodities (olive oil, pigs, firewood, barley, wheat) and in fluctuations in rents for real estate. Linking the island's economic history to the larger political scene, he offers a trenchant and overdue argument for an analysis of the Delian economy as a regional phenomenon, not - as others have seen it - as a center of international exchange.   [brief]
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Title: Afghanistan: the Soviet invasion and the Afghan response, 1979-1982 
Author: Kakar, M. Hasan
Published: University of California Press,  1997
Subjects: Middle Eastern Studies | Politics | History | Middle Eastern History
Publisher's Description: Few people are more respected or better positioned to speak on the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan than M. Hassan Kakar. A professor at Kabul University and scholar of Afghanistan affairs at the time of the 1978 coup d'état, Kakar vividly describes the events surrounding the Soviet invasion in 1979 and the encounter between the military superpower and the poorly armed Afghans. The events that followed are carefully detailed, with eyewitness accounts and authoritative documentation that provide an unparalleled view of this historical moment.Because of his prominence Kakar was at first treated with deference by the Marxist government and was not imprisoned, although he openly criticized the regime. When he was put behind bars the outcry from scholars all over the world possibly saved his life. In prison for five years, he continued collecting information, much of it from prominent Afghans of varying political persuasions who were themselves prisoners.Kakar brings firsthand knowledge and a historian's sensibility to his account of the invasion and its aftermath. This is both a personal document and a historical one - Kakar lived through the events he describes, and his concern for human rights rather than party politics infuses his writing. As Afghans and the rest of the world try to make sense of Afghanistan's recent past, Kakar's voice will be one of those most listened to.   [brief]
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Title: Hellenistic constructs: essays in culture, history, and historiography
Author: Cartledge, Paul
Published: University of California Press,  1997
Subjects: Classics | Classical History | History | Ancient History
Publisher's Description: The Hellenistic period (approximately the last three centuries B.C.), with its cultural complexities and enduring legacies, retains a lasting fascination today. Reflecting the vigor and productivity of scholarship directed at this period in the past decade, this collection of original essays is a wide-ranging exploration of current discoveries and questions. The twelve essays emphasize the cultural interaction of Greek and non-Greek societies in the Hellenistic period, in contrast to more conventional focuses on politics, society, or economy. The result of original research by some of the leading scholars in Hellenistic history and culture, this volume is an exemplary illustration of the cultural richness of this period.Paul Cartledge's introduction contains an illuminating introductory overview of current trends in Hellenistic scholarship. The essays themselves range over broad questions of comparative historiography, literature, religion, and the roles of Athens, Rome, and the Jews within the context of the Hellenistic world. The volume is dedicated to Frank Walbank and includes an updated bibliography of his work which has been essential to our understanding of the Hellenistic period.   [brief]
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Title: When we began there were witchmen: an oral history from Mount Kenya 
Author: Fadiman, Jeffrey
Published: University of California Press,  1994
Subjects: History | Anthropology | African Studies | African History
Publisher's Description: This is the history of the Meru people of Mount Kenya, based on their own traditions, from the earliest times through the colonial period. Many of these tales have been ritually passed down through no fewer than nineteen generations; others were remembered by those personally involved. Jeffrey Fadiman gathered them in interviews with more than 100 of the Meru's oldest men and women.The traditions touch on every era of the Meru past. They include narrations, songs, chants, and riddles. They tell of a mysterious origin, past enslavement, despairing flight, mountain warriorhood, British conquest, and the fight for freedom. The Meru elders spoke most often of urogi, or witchcraft, the incantations, rituals, and potions used to deal with the supernatural aspects of Meru life. As their society evolved, so did their urogi , developing a history of its own as practitioners in every generation sought to cope with the challenges of slavery, migration, war, colonialism, and Christianity.Fadiman has crafted the tales into a compelling narrative, passing on in his turn the stories he was given. This is African history from African perspectives that stretch back over 300 years.   [brief]
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Title: The vanishing vision: the inside story of public television 
Author: Day, James 1918-
Published: University of California Press,  1995
Subjects: Media Studies | American Studies | Sociology | Television and Radio | History
Publisher's Description: This spirited, first-ever history of public television offers an insider's account of its topsy-turvy, forty-year odyssey. James Day, a founder of San Francisco's KQED and a past president of New York's WNET, chronicles public television's fascinating evolution from its inauspicious roots in the 1950s to its strong, fiercely debated presence in contemporary culture. The Vanishing Vision provides a vivid and often amusing behind-the-screens history. Day tells how a program producer, desperate to locate a family willing to live with television cameras for seven months, borrowed a dime - and a suggestion - from a blind date and telephoned the Louds of Santa Barbara. The result was the mesmerizing twelve-hour documentary, An American Family . Day relates how Big Bird and his friends were created to spice up Sesame Street when test runs showed a flagging interest in the program's "live-action" segments. And he describes how Frieda Hennock, the first woman appointed to the FCC, overpowered the resistance of her male colleagues to lay the foundation for public television.Along the way, Day identifies the particular forces that have shaped public television. The result, in his view, is a Byzantine bureaucracy kept on a leash by an untrusting Congress, with a fragmented leadership that lacks a clearly defined mission in today's multimedia environment. Public television's "democratic" structure of over 300 stations stifles boldness and innovation while absorbing money needed for national programming.Day calls for a bold rethinking of public television's mission, advocating a system that is adequately funded and independent of government, one capable of countering commercial television's "lowest-common-denominator" approach with a full range of substantive programs, comedy as well as culture, entertainment as well as information.   [brief]
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Title: Mirages of transition: the Peruvian altiplano, 1780-1930 
Author: Jacobsen, Nils 1948-
Published: University of California Press,  1993
Subjects: History | Anthropology | Latin American History | Latin American Studies
Publisher's Description: This case study of the Peruvian altiplano, the vast high-altitude plains surrounding Lake Titicaca, combines economic and social analysis with cultural and institutional history. Nils Jacobsen challenges the prevailing view that the rural Andes underwent a successful transition to capitalism between the mid-nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. He argues that although the political, economic, and administrative structures of colonialism were gradually dismantled by the region's advancing market economy, colonial modes of constructing power and social identity have lingered on even to this day.The result of painstaking research in remote rural archives, some of them now made inaccessible by the Shining Path, Mirages of Transition will become the definitive work on the Peruvian highlands.   [brief]
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Title: The Sex of things: gender and consumption in historical perspective
Author: De Grazia, Victoria
Published: University of California Press,  1996
Subjects: History | Gender Studies | European History
Publisher's Description: This volume brings together the most innovative historical work on the conjoined themes of gender and consumption. In thirteen pioneering essays, some of the most important voices in the field consider how Western societies think about and use goods, how goods shape female, as well as male, identities, how labor in the family came to be divided between a male breadwinner and a female consumer, and how fashion and cosmetics shape women's notions of themselves and the society in which they live. Together these essays represent the state of the art in research and writing about the development of modern consumption practices, gender roles, and the sexual division of labor in both the United States and Europe.Covering a period of two centuries, the essays range from Marie Antoinette's Paris to the burgeoning cosmetics culture of mid-century America. They deal with topics such as blue-collar workers' survival strategies in the interwar years, the anxieties of working-class consumers, and the efforts of the state to define women's - especially wives' and mothers' - consumer identity. Generously illustrated, this volume also includes extensive introductions and a comprehensive annotated bibliography. Drawing on social, economic, and art history as well as cultural studies, it provides a rich context for the current discourse around consumption, particularly in relation to feminist discussions of gender.   [brief]
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Title: Peasants and monks in British India 
Author: Pinch, William R 1960-
Published: University of California Press,  1996
Subjects: History | Asian History | South Asia | Postcolonial Studies | Hinduism
Publisher's Description: In this compelling social history, William R. Pinch tackles one of the most important but most neglected fields of the colonial history of India: the relation between monasticism and caste. The highly original inquiry yields rich insights into the central structure and dynamics of Hindu society - insights that are not only of scholarly but also of great political significance.Perhaps no two images are more associated with rural India than the peasant who labors in an oppressive, inflexible social structure and the ascetic monk who denounces worldly concerns. Pinch argues that, contrary to these stereotypes, North India's monks and peasants have not been passive observers of history; they have often been engaged with questions of identity, status, and hierarchy - particularly during the British period. Pinch's work is especially concerned with the ways each group manipulated the rhetoric of religious devotion and caste to further its own agenda for social reform. Although their aims may have been quite different - Ramanandi monastics worked for social equity, while peasants agitated for higher social status - the strategies employed by these two communities shaped the popular political culture of Gangetic north India during and after the struggle for independence from the British.   [brief]
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Title: Mapping early modern Japan: space, place, and culture in the Tokugawa period, 1603-1868
Author: Yonemoto, Marcia 1964-
Published: University of California Press,  2003
Subjects: History | Asian Studies | Geography | Japan
Publisher's Description: This elegant history considers a fascinating array of texts, cultural practices, and intellectual processes - including maps and mapmaking, poetry, travel writing, popular fiction, and encyclopedias - to chart the emergence of a new geographical consciousness in early modern Japan. Marcia Yonemoto's wide-ranging history of ideas traces changing conceptions and representations of space by looking at the roles played by writers, artists, commercial publishers, and the Shogunal government in helping to fashion a new awareness of space and place in this period. Her impressively researched study shows how spatial and geographical knowledge confined to elites in early Japan became more generalized, flexible, and widespread in the Tokugawa period. In the broadest sense, her book grasps the elusive processes through which people came to name, to know, and to interpret their worlds in narrative and visual forms.   [brief]
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Title: The temptations of evolutionary ethics 
Author: Farber, Paul Lawrence 1944-
Published: University of California Press,  1994
Subjects: Philosophy | History | Ethics | History and Philosophy of Science
Publisher's Description: Evolutionary theory tells us about our biological past; can it also guide us to a moral future? Paul Farber's compelling book describes a century-old philosophical hope held by many biologists, anthropologists, psychologists, and social thinkers: that universal ethical and social imperatives are built into human nature and can be discovered through knowledge of evolutionary theory.Farber describes three upsurges of enthusiasm for evolutionary ethics. The first came in the early years of mid-nineteenth century evolutionary theories; the second in the 1920s and '30s, in the years after the cultural catastrophe of World War I; and the third arrived with the recent grand claims of sociobiology to offer a sound biological basis for a theory of human culture.Unlike many who have written on evolutionary ethics, Farber considers the responses made by philosophers over the years. He maintains that their devastating criticisms have been forgotten - thus the history of evolutionary ethics is essentially one of oft-repeated philosophical mistakes.Historians, scientists, social scientists, and anyone concerned about the elusive basis of selflessness, altruism, and morality will welcome Farber's enlightening book.   [brief]
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Title: American media and mass culture: left perspectives
Author: Lazere, Donald
Published: University of California Press,  1987
Subjects: History | United States History | Media Studies
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Title: The private worlds of Marcel Duchamp: desire, liberation, and the self in modern culture 
Author: Seigel, Jerrold
Published: University of California Press,  1997
Subjects: Art | History | Popular Culture
Publisher's Description: Marcel Duchamp is a founding figure of twentieth-century art and culture, the common source to which many contemporary movements trace their roots. His career has often been celebrated for its contradictions and discontinuities, its disparate parts unified only by their assault on the traditions of art. Jerrold Seigel offers a wholly different view, revealing a web of interrelated themes that unify Duchamp's work and tie it to his life.At the book's center is a reinterpretation of the famous "readymades," of which the urinal "Fountain" and the defaced Mona Lisa were the most shocking. By recovering their history, Seigel shows that their playful and rebellious surface veiled the meanings that linked them to Duchamp's pictures (especially the famous "Large Glass," here illuminated by a comprehensive new reading) and to his experiments with language. The result gives the artist's career the unity of a colorful and intricate puzzle.Behind that puzzle were the great modernist themes of isolation, perpetuated desire, and the imagined dissolution of the self. These themes entered Duchamp's mind both from his social and cultural environment and from the shaping experience of his family; around them were woven the patterns of working and loving that Seigel uncovers in his life. Duchamp emerges not just as a coherent, understandable personality, but as an exemplary one, his very eccentricities reflecting essential dimensions of modern experience.A mythic presence in modern culture, a hero whose story we tell for the sake of its valuable lessons, Duchamp opened the floodgates to a sea of questions about the nature and meaning of art. Seigel demands that we think again about these questions, and about the answers that Duchamp's heirs and followers have tried to give to them.   [brief]
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Title: On holiday: a history of vacationing
Author: Löfgren, Orvar
Published: University of California Press,  1999
Subjects: History | Anthropology | Travel | American Studies | Cultural Anthropology | Popular Culture | Criminology
Publisher's Description: Löfgren takes us on a tour of the Western holiday world and shows how two centuries of "learning to be a tourist" have shaped our own ways of vacationing. We see how fashions in destinations have changed through the years, with popular images (written, drawn, painted, and later photographed) teaching the tourist what to look for and how to experience it. Travelers present and future will never see their cruises, treks, ecotours, round-the-world journeys, or trips to the vacation cottage or condo in quite the same way again. All our land-, sea-, and mindscapes will be the richer for Löfgren's insights.   [brief]
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Title: When the Soviet Union entered world politics 
Author: Jacobson, Jon 1938-
Published: University of California Press,  1994
Subjects: History | Politics | European History | Russian and Eastern European Studies
Publisher's Description: The dissolution of the Soviet Union has aroused much interest in the USSR's role in world politics during its 74-year history and in how the international relations of the twentieth century were shaped by the Soviet Union. Jon Jacobson examines Soviet foreign relations during the period from the end of the Civil War to the beginning of the first Five-Year Plan, focusing on the problems confronting the Bolsheviks as they sought to promote national security and economic development. He demonstrates the central importance of foreign relations to the political imagination of Soviet leaders, both in their plans for industrialization and in the struggle for supremacy among Lenin's successors.Jacobson adopts a post-Cold War interpretative stance, incorporating glasnost and perestroika-era revelations. He also considers Soviet relations with both Europe and Asia from a global perspective, integrating the two modes of early Soviet foreign relations - revolution and diplomacy - into a coherent discussion. Most significantly, he synthesizes the wealth of information that became available to scholars since the 1960s. The result is a stimulating work of international history that interfaces with the sophisticated existing body of scholarship on early Soviet history.   [brief]
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Title: Recreating Japanese women, 1600-1945
Author: Bernstein, Gail Lee
Published: University of California Press,  1991
Subjects: History | Asian History | Japan | Women's Studies
Publisher's Description: In thirteen wide-ranging essays, scholars and students of Asian and women's studies will find a vivid exploration of how female roles and feminine identity have evolved over 350 years, from the Tokugawa era to the end of World War II. Starting from the premise that gender is not a biological given, but is socially constructed and culturally transmitted, the authors describe the forces of change in the construction of female gender and explore the gap between the ideal of womanhood and the reality of Japanese women's lives. Most of all, the contributors speak to the diversity that has characterized women's experience in Japan. This is an imaginative, pioneering work, offering an interdisciplinary approach that will encourage a reconsideration of the paradigms of women's history, hitherto rooted in the Western experience.   [brief]
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Title: Gregory the Great: perfection in imperfection
Author: Straw, Carole Ellen
Published: University of California Press,  1991
Subjects: History | European History | Classical History | Christianity
Publisher's Description: Gregory I (590-604) is often considered the first medieval pope and the first exponent of a truly medieval spirituality. Carole Straw places Gregory in his historical context and considers the many facets of his personality - monk, preacher, and pope - in order to elucidate the structure of his thou . . . [more]
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