Title: Reconfiguring modernity: concepts of nature in Japanese political ideology
Author: Thomas, Julia Adeney 1958-
Published: University of California Press,  2002
Subjects: History | Japan | Intellectual History | Asian History
Publisher's Description: Julia Adeney Thomas turns the concept of nature into a powerful analytical lens through which to view Japanese modernity, bringing the study of both Japanese history and political modernity to a new level of clarity. She shows that nature necessarily functions as a political concept and that changing ideas of nature's political authority were central during Japan's transformation from a semifeudal world to an industrializing colonial empire. In political documents from the nineteenth to the early twentieth century, nature was redefined, moving from the universal, spatial concept of the Tokugawa period, through temporal, social Darwinian ideas of inevitable progress and competitive struggle, to a celebration of Japan as a nation uniquely in harmony with nature. The so-called traditional "Japanese love of nature" masks modern state power. Thomas's theoretically sophisticated study rejects the supposition that modernity is the ideological antithesis of nature, overcoming the determinism of the physical environment through technology and liberating denatured subjects from the chains of biology and tradition. In making "nature" available as a critical term for political analysis, this book yields new insights into prewar Japan's failure to achieve liberal democracy, as well as an alternative means of understanding modernity and the position of non-Western nations within it.   [brief]
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Title: Pseudo-Hecataeus, On the Jews: legitimizing the Jewish diaspora 
Author: Bar-Kochva, Bezalel
Published: University of California Press,  1997
Subjects: Jewish Studies | History | Ancient History | Jewish Studies
Publisher's Description: Debate over the authenticity of "On the Jews" has persisted for nearly 1,900 years. Bezalel Bar-Kochva attempts to overcome this stalemate in his finely detailed and convincingly argued study that proves the forgery of the book and suggests not only a source for the text, but also a social, political, and cultural setting that explains its conception.Bar-Kochva argues that the author of this treatise belonged to the moderate conservative Jews of Alexandria, whose practices were contrary to the contemporary trends of Hellenistic Judaism. They rejected the application of Greek philosophy and allegorical interpretations of the Holy scriptures and advocated the use of Pentateuch Hebrew as the language for educating and for religious services. They showed a keen interest in Judea and identified themselves with the Jews of the Holy Land. "On the Jews," then, was the manifesto of this group and was written at the peak period of the Hasmonean kingdom. Its main purpose was to legitimize Jewish residence in Egypt, despite being explicitly prohibited in the Pentateuch, and to justify the continued residence of Jews there in a time of prosperity and expansion of the Jewish independent state.   [brief]
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Title: Beyond the pale: the Jewish encounter with late imperial Russia
Author: Nathans, Benjamin
Published: University of California Press,  2002
Subjects: History | Jewish Studies | Russian and Eastern European Studies
Publisher's Description: A surprising number of Jews lived, literally and figuratively, "beyond the Pale" of Jewish Settlement in tsarist Russia during the half-century before the Revolution of 1917. Thanks to the availability of long-closed Russian archives, along with a wide range of other sources, Benjamin Nathans reinterprets the history of the Russian-Jewish encounter. In the wake of Russia's "Great Reforms," Nathans writes, a policy of selective integration stimulated social and geographic mobility among the empire's Jews. The reaction that culminated, toward the turn of the century, in ethnic restrictions on admission to universities, the professions, and other institutions of civil society reflected broad anxieties that Russians were being placed at a disadvantage in their own empire. Nathans's conclusions about the effects of selective integration and the Russian-Jewish encounter during this formative period will be of great interest to all students of modern Jewish and modern Russian history.   [brief]
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Title: Early modern Japan
Author: Totman, Conrad D
Published: University of California Press,  1993
Subjects: History | Asian Studies | Asian History | Japan
Publisher's Description: This thoughtfully organized survey of Japan's early modern period (1568-1868) is a remarkable blend of political, economic, intellectual, literary, and cultural history. The only truly comprehensive study in English of the Tokugawa period, it also introduces a new ecological perspective, covering na . . . [more]
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Title: Territories of grace: cultural change in the seventeenth-century Diocese of Grenoble 
Author: Luria, Keith P
Published: University of California Press,  1991
Subjects: History | European History | Christianity | French Studies
Publisher's Description: Territories of Grace offers a sophisticated model of cultural change in early modern rural society, by examining the religion of villagers in the French diocese of Grenoble during the Counter-Reformation. Keith P. Luria describes the encounter of village and official forms of piety, arguing that historians have oversimplified the struggle between high and low culture in early modern Europe. He shows how religion was constructed in a complex relationship between villagers, concerned with creating their own religion, and a bishop, intent on cultivating in his flock a Counter-Reformation style of worship and a new standard of social behavior.Luria analyzes records of pastoral visits, examines forms of devotion to saints, and undertakes an ethnographic investigation of one community, to illustrate this interaction. He uncovers a process of cultural change in which villagers and reformers alike took an active role in creating their own culture by adopting, adapting, or resisting the symbols, practices, and meanings of others. The theoretical insights of his study will be of interest to historians, anthropologists, and others concerned with rural society, comparative religion, and questions of cultural change.   [brief]
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Title: The Marcus Garvey and Universal Negro Improvement Association papers
Author: Hill, Robert A 1943-
Published: University of California Press,  1995
Subjects: History | African Studies | African History | Politics
Publisher's Description: "Africa for the Africans" was the name given in Africa to the extraordinary black social protest movement led by Jamaican Marcus Mosiah Garvey (1887-1940). Volumes I-VII of the Marcus Garvey and Universal Negro Improvement Association Papers chronicled the Garvey movement that flourished in the United States during the 1920s. Now, the long-awaited African volumes of this edition (Volumes VIII and IX and a forthcoming Volume X) demonstrate clearly the central role Africans played in the development of the Garvey phenomenon.The African volumes provide the first authoritative account of how Africans transformed Garveyism from an external stimulus into an African social movement. They also represent the most extensive collection of documents ever gathered on the early African nationalism of the inter-war period. Here is a detailed chronicle of the spread of Garvey's call for African redemption throughout Africa and the repressive colonial responses it engendered. Volume VIII begins in 1917 with the little-known story of the Pan-African commercial schemes that preceded Garveyism and charts the early African reactions to the UNIA. Volume IX continues the story, documenting the establishment of UNIA chapters throughout Africa and presenting new evidence linking Garveyism and nascent Namibian nationalism.   [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: Louis XIII, the Just
Author: Moote, A. Lloyd (Alanson Lloyd)
Published: University of California Press,  1989
Subjects: History | European History | Autobiographies and Biographies
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Title: Of one blood: abolitionism and the origins of racial equality
Author: Goodman, Paul 1934-
Published: University of California Press,  1998
Subjects: History | United States History | American Studies
Publisher's Description: The abolition movement is perhaps the most salient example of the struggle the United States has faced in its long and complex confrontation with the issue of race. In his final book, historian Paul Goodman, who died in 1995, presents a new and important interpretation of abolitionism. Goodman pays particular attention to the role that blacks played in the movement. In the half-century following the American Revolution, a sizable free black population emerged, the result of state-sponsored emancipation in the North and individual manumission in the slave states. At the same time, a white movement took shape, in the form of the American Colonization Society, that proposed to solve the slavery question by sending the emancipated blacks to Africa and making Liberia an American "colony." The resistance of northern free blacks was instrumental in exposing the racist ideology underlying colonization and inspiring early white abolitionists to attack slavery straight on. In a society suffused with racism, says Goodman, abolitionism stood apart by its embrace of racial equality as a Christian imperative.Goodman demonstrates that the abolitionist movement had a far broader social basis than was previously thought. Drawing on census and town records, his portraits of abolitionists reveal the many contributions of ordinary citizens, especially laborers and women long overshadowed by famous movement leaders. Paul Goodman's humane spirit informs these pages. His book is a scholarly legacy that will enrich the history of antebellum race and reform movements for years to come."[God] hath made of one blood all nations of men for to dwell on all the face of the earth." - Acts 17:26   [brief]
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Title: Becoming Chinese: passages to modernity and beyond 
Author: Yeh, Wen-Hsin
Published: University of California Press,  2000
Subjects: History | China | Asian Literature | Asian History
Publisher's Description: This volume evaluates the dual roles of war and modernity in the transformation of twentieth-century Chinese identity. The contributors, all leading researchers, argue that war, no less than revolution, deserves attention as a major force in the making of twentieth-century Chinese history. Further, they show that modernity in material culture and changes in intellectual consciousness should serve as twin foci of a new wave of scholarly analysis. Examining in particular the rise of modern Chinese cities and the making of the Chinese nation-state, the contributors to this interdisciplinary volume of cultural history provide new ways of thinking about China's modern transformation up to the 1950s. Taken together, the essays demonstrate that the combined effect of a modernizing state and an industrializing economy weakened the Chinese bourgeoisie and undercut the individual's quest for autonomy. Drawing upon new archival sources, these theoretically informed, thoroughly revisionist essays focus on topics such as Western-inspired modernity, urban cosmopolitanism, consumer culture, gender relationships, interchanges between city and countryside, and the growing impact of the state on the lives of individuals. The volume makes an important contribution toward a postsocialist understanding of twentieth-century China.   [brief]
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Title: Taste and power: furnishing Modern France
Author: Auslander, Leora
Published: University of California Press,  1996
Subjects: History | European History | Art History | European Studies
Publisher's Description: Louis XIV, regency, rococo, neoclassical, empire, art nouveau, and historicist pastiche: furniture styles march across French history as regimes rise and fall. In this extraordinary social history, Leora Auslander explores the changing meaning of furniture from the mid-seventeenth to the early twentieth century, revealing how the aesthetics of everyday life were as integral to political events as to economic and social transformations. Enriched by Auslander's experience as a cabinetmaker, this work demonstrates how furniture served to represent and even generate its makers' and consumers' identities.   [brief]
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Title: The family on trial in revolutionary France
Author: Desan, Suzanne 1957-
Published: University of California Press,  2004
Subjects: History | European Studies | French Studies | Women's Studies
Publisher's Description: In a groundbreaking book that challenges many assumptions about gender and politics in the French Revolution, Suzanne Desan offers an insightful analysis of the ways the Revolution radically redefined the family and its internal dynamics. She shows how revolutionary politics and laws brought about a social revolution within households and created space for thousands of French women and men to reimagine their most intimate relationships. Families negotiated new social practices, including divorce, the reduction of paternal authority, egalitarian inheritance for sons and daughters alike, and the granting of civil rights to illegitimate children. Contrary to arguments that claim the Revolution bound women within a domestic sphere, The Family on Trial maintains that the new civil laws and gender politics offered many women unexpected opportunities to gain power, property, or independence. The family became a political arena, a practical terrain for creating the Republic in day-to-day life. From 1789, citizens across France - sons and daughters, unhappily married spouses and illegitimate children, pamphleteers and moralists, deputies and judges - all disputed how the family should be reformed to remake the new France. They debated how revolutionary ideals and institutions should transform the emotional bonds, gender dynamics, legal customs, and economic arrangements that structured the family. They asked how to bring the principles of liberty, equality, and regeneration into the home. And as French citizens confronted each other in the home, in court, and in print, they gradually negotiated new domestic practices that balanced Old Regime customs with revolutionary innovations in law and culture. In a narrative that combines national-level analysis with a case study of family contestation in Normandy, Desan explores these struggles to bring politics into households and to envision and put into practice a new set of familial relationships.   [brief]
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Title: Policing Shanghai, 1927-1937
Author: Wakeman, Frederic E
Published: University of California Press,  1996
Subjects: History | Asian History | China | Urban Studies | Criminology
Publisher's Description: Prewar Shanghai: casinos, brothels, Green Gang racketeers, narcotics syndicates, gun-runners, underground Communist assassins, Comitern secret agents. Frederic Wakeman's masterful study of the most colorful and corrupt city in the world at the time provides a panoramic view of the confrontation and collaboration between the Nationalist secret police and the Shanghai underworld.In detailing the life and politics of China's largest urban center during the Guomindang era, Wakeman covers an array of topics: the puritanical social controls implemented by the police; the regional differences that surfaced among Shanghai's Chinese, the influence of imperialism and Western-trained officials. Parts of this book read like a spy novel, with secret police, torture, assassination; and power struggles among the French, International Settlement, and Japanese consular police within Shanghai.Chiang Kai-shek wanted to prove that the Chinese could rule Shanghai and the country by themselves, rather than be exploited and dominated by foreign powers. His efforts to reclaim the crime-ridden city failed, partly because of the outbreak of war with Japan in 1937, but also because the Nationalist police force was itself corrupted by the city.Wakeman's exhaustively researched study is a major contribution to the study of the Nationalist regime and to modern Chinese urban history. It also shows that twentieth-century China has not been characterized by discontinuity, because autocratic government - whether Nationalist or Communist - has prevailed.   [brief]
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Title: In a cold crater: cultural and intellectual life in Berlin, 1945-1948 
Author: Schivelbusch, Wolfgang 1941-
Published: University of California Press,  1998
Subjects: History | German Studies | European History | Literature | Film | Music
Publisher's Description: Although the three conspicuous cultures of Berlin in the twentieth century - Weimar, Nazi, and Cold War - are well documented, little is known about the years between the fall of the Third Reich and the beginning of the Cold War. In a Cold Crater is the history of this volatile postwar moment, when the capital of the world's recently defeated public enemy assumed great emotional and symbolic meaning.This is a story, not of major intellectual and cultural achievements (for there were none in those years), but of enormous hopes and plans that failed. It is the story of members of the once famous volcano-dancing Berlin intelligentsia, torn apart by Nazism and exile, now re-encountering one another. Those who had stayed in Berlin in 1933 crawled out of the rubble, while many of the exiles returned with the Allied armies as members of the various cultural and re-educational units. All of them were eager to rebuild a neo-Weimar republic of letters, arts, and thought. Some were highly qualified and serious. Many were classic opportunists. A few came close to being clowns. After three years of "carnival," recreated by Schivelbusch in all its sound and fury, they were driven from the stage by the Cold War.As Berlin once again becomes the German capital, Schivelbusch's masterful cultural history is certain to captivate historians and general readers alike.   [brief]
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Title: Savagism and civilization: a study of the Indian and the American mind
Author: Pearce, Roy Harvey
Published: University of California Press,  1988
Subjects: History | United States History | Native American Studies
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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: Colonizing the body: state medicine and epidemic disease in nineteenth-century India
Author: Arnold, David 1946-
Published: University of California Press,  1993
Subjects: Asian Studies | South Asia | Asian History | Medicine | History
Publisher's Description: In this innovative analysis of medicine and disease in colonial India, David Arnold explores the vital role of the state in medical and public health activities, arguing that Western medicine became a critical battleground between the colonized and the colonizers.Focusing on three major epidemic diseases - smallpox, cholera, and plague - Arnold analyzes the impact of medical interventionism. He demonstrates that Western medicine as practiced in India was not simply transferred from West to East, but was also fashioned in response to local needs and Indian conditions.By emphasizing this colonial dimension of medicine, Arnold highlights the centrality of the body to political authority in British India and shows how medicine both influenced and articulated the intrinsic contradictions of colonial rule.   [brief]
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Title: Dreams of difference: the Japan romantic school and the crisis of modernity
Author: Doak, Kevin Michael
Published: University of California Press,  1994
Subjects: History | Asian History | Japan | Literary Theory and Criticism
Publisher's Description: From 1935 to 1945, the Japan Romantic School (Nihon Romanha), a group of major intellectuals and literary figures, explored issues concerning politics, literature, and nationalism in ways that still influence cultural discourse in Japan today. Kevin Doak's timely study is a broad critique of modernity in early twentieth-century Japan. He uses close readings and translations of texts and poems to suggest that the school's interest in romanticism stemmed from its attempt to surmount the "cultural crisis" of lost traditions. This attempt to overcome modernity eventually reduced the movement's earlier critical impulses to expressions of nationalist longing.   [brief]
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Title: Sex seen: the emergence of modern sexuality in America
Author: Ullman, Sharon R 1955-
Published: University of California Press,  1998
Subjects: History | Gender Studies | United States History
Publisher's Description: Sex Seen provides a complex and intriguing account of the changes that have taken place in the social construction of sexuality during the past century. Focusing on Sacramento, California, at the dawn of the twentieth century, Sharon Ullman juxtaposes early cinema, vaudeville performances, and popular newspapers and magazines with insights drawn from close interpretations of transcripts from Sacramento court cases. She demonstrates how attitudes that emerged in the popular discourse - ideas about gender roles, female desire, prostitution, divorce, and homosexuality - often found complex and contradictory expression in the courts. As judges, prosecutors, defense attorneys, and juries all weighed in with differing opinions, the courtroom itself became a site of multiple discourses that attempted to make sense of a growing sexual chaos. In tracing the birth of modern sexuality, Ullman chronicles the dynamics of social change during a unique cultural moment and explains the shifts in the sexual ethos of turn-of-the-century America. Instead of telling the familiar story of steadily increasing liberation of sexual urges, Ullman chronicles the complex confusions and negotiations of an increasingly public sexual discourse. She relates how laws against cross-dressing gained force at the same time that female impersonation became popular in vaudeville acts, how images of prostitutes were changed by the commercialization of the female body in advertising and film, and how visible expression of female desire was submerged in rape and divorce proceedings. Ullman blends social history, textual analysis, and film and performance criticism to explain how sexuality and desire became an essential part of personal identity in this century. Her keen, accessible account of a community on the brink of the modern era offers a provocative interpretation of the seeds of our sexual present.   [brief]
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