Title: Fountain of fortune: money and monetary policy in China, 1000-1700
Author: Von Glahn, Richard
Published: University of California Press,  1996
Subjects: History | China | Asian History | Economics and Business
Publisher's Description: In this study, the first of its kind in the English language, Richard von Glahn offers a definitive analysis of the economic, political, and social history of money and monetary policy during the Song, Yuan, Ming, and early Qing dynasties. Von Glahn presents a revisionist interpretation of previously held ideas about the effect of money and international trade in bullion on the rise and decline of dynastic power in China.Von Glahn's study also links Chinese monetary history to changing trends in money use and trade in gold and silver in Asia, Europe, and the Western Hemisphere. China's shift to a silver economy had a decisive influence not only on the growth of a market economy in China, but also on the formation of a global economy in the early modern era.Exhaustively researched from original archival sources, Fountain of Fortune critically examines the many facets of China's domestic and foreign monetary policy: the foundations of Chinese monetary theory; mining and minting of bronze coin; the rise and fall of paper currency; and the transition to silver bullion as the monetary standard. Providing keen insight into the economic and social history of Chinese society, this volume will serve as an indispensable reference for the reader seeking to understand China's distinctive history and its relationship to the world at large.   [brief]
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Title: An Ottoman tragedy: history and historiography at play
Author: Piterberg, Gabriel 1955-
Published: University of California Press,  2003
Subjects: History | Middle Eastern History | Historiography | Middle Eastern Studies
Publisher's Description: In the space of six years early in the seventeenth century, the Ottoman Empire underwent such turmoil and trauma - the assassination of the young ruler Osman II, the re-enthronement and subsequent abdication of his mad uncle Mustafa I, for a start - that a scholar pronounced the period's three-day-long dramatic climax "an Ottoman Tragedy." Under Gabriel Piterberg's deft analysis, this period of crisis becomes a historical laboratory for the history of the Ottoman Empire in the seventeenth century - an opportunity to observe the dialectical play between history as an occurrence and experience and history as a recounting of that experience. Piterberg reconstructs the Ottoman narration of this fraught period from the foundational text, produced in the early 1620s, to the composition of the state narrative at the end of the seventeenth century. His work brings theories of historiography into dialogue with the actual interpretation of Ottoman historical texts, and forces a rethinking of both Ottoman historiography and the Ottoman state in the seventeenth century. A provocative reinterpretation of a major event in Ottoman history, this work reconceives the relation between historiography and history.   [brief]
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Title: Images and empires: visuality in colonial and postcolonial Africa
Author: Landau, Paul Stuart 1962-
Published: University of California Press,  2002
Subjects: Anthropology | African Studies | Art History | Cultural Anthropology | History
Publisher's Description: Figurative images have long played a critical, if largely unexamined, role in Africa - mediating relationships between the colonizer and the colonized, the state and the individual, and the global and the local. This pivotal volume considers the meaning and power of images in African history and culture. Paul S. Landau and Deborah Kaspin have assembled a wide-ranging collection of essays dealing with specific visual forms, including monuments, cinema, cartoons, domestic and professional photography, body art, world fairs, and museum exhibits. The contributors, experts in a number of disciplines, discuss various modes of visuality in Africa and of Africa, investigating the interplay of visual images with personal identity, class, gender, politics, and wealth. Integral to the argument of the book are over seventy contextualized illustrations. Africans saw foreigners in margarine wrappers, Tintin cartoons, circus posters, and Hollywood movies; westerners gleaned impressions of Africans from colonial exhibitions, Tarzan films, and naturalist magazines. The authors provide concrete examples of the construction of Africa's image in the modern world. They reveal how imperial iconographies sought to understand, deny, control, or transform authority, as well as the astonishing complexity and hybridity of visual communication within Africa itself.   [brief]
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Title: Morality tales: law and gender in the Ottoman court of Aintab
Author: Peirce, Leslie P
Published: University of California Press,  2003
Subjects: History | Middle Eastern Studies | Middle Eastern History | Gender Studies
Publisher's Description: In this skillful analysis, Leslie Peirce delves into the life of a sixteenth-century Middle Eastern community, bringing to light the ways that women and men used their local law court to solve personal, family, and community problems. Examining one year's proceedings of the court of Aintab, an Anatolian city that had recently been conquered by the Ottoman sultanate, Peirce argues that local residents responded to new opportunities and new constraints by negotiating flexible legal practices. Their actions and the different compromises they reached in court influenced how society viewed gender and also created a dialogue with the ruling regime over mutual rights and obligations. Locating its discussion of gender and legal issues in the context of the changing administrative practices and shifting power relations of the period, Morality Tales argues that it was only in local interpretation that legal rules acquired vitality and meaning.   [brief]
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Title: Cool conduct: the culture of distance in Weimar Germany 
Author: Lethen, Helmut
Published: University of California Press,  2002
Subjects: History | Sociology | German Studies | Literary Theory and Criticism
Publisher's Description: Cool Conduct is an elegant interpretation of attitudes and mentalities that informed the Weimar Republic by a scholar well known for his profound knowledge of this period. Helmut Lethen writes of "cool conduct" as a cultivated antidote to the heated atmosphere of post-World War I Germany, as a way o . . . [more]
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Title: Global community: the role of international organizations in the making of the contemporary world
Author: Iriye, Akira
Published: University of California Press,  2002
Subjects: Politics | International Relations | History | Global Studies
Publisher's Description: The "global community" is a term we take for granted today. But how did the global community, both as an idea and as a reality, originate and develop over time? This book examines this concept by looking at the emergence, growth, and activities of international organizations--both governmental and nongovernmental--from the end of the nineteenth century to today. Akira Iriye, one of this country's most preeminent historians, proposes a significant rereading of the history of the last fifty years, suggesting that the central influence on the international scene in this period was not the Cold War, but rather a deepening web of international interactions. This groundbreaking book, the first systematic study of international organizations by a historian, moves beyond the usual framework for studying international relations--politics, war, diplomacy, and other interstate affairs--as it traces the crucial role played by international organizations in determining the shape of the world today. Iriye's sweeping discussion of international organizations around the world examines multinational corporations, religious organizations, regional communities, transnational private associations, environmental organizations, and other groups to illuminate the evolution and meaning of the global community and global consciousness. While states have been preoccupied with their own national interests such as security and prestige, international organizations have been actively engaged in promoting cultural exchange, offering humanitarian assistance, extending developmental aid, protecting the environment, and championing human rights. In short, they have made important contributions to making the world a more interdependent and peaceful place. This book, tracing the development of the global community in a truly innovative way, will win a wide readership among those interested in understanding the growing phenomenon of globalization and its meaning for us today. Global Community is based on Iriye's Jefferson lectures at the University of California, Berkeley.   [brief]
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Title: Italo Balbo: a Fascist life
Author: Segrè, Claudio G
Published: University of California Press,  1990
Subjects: History | European History | Autobiographies and Biographies | Politics
Publisher's Description: Pioneering aviator, blackshirt leader, colonial governor, confidante and heir-apparent to Benito Mussolini, the dashing and charismatic Italo Balbo exemplified the ideals of Fascist Italy during the 1920s and 30s. He earned national notoriety after World War I as a ruthless squadrista whose blackshirt forces crushed socialist and trade union organizations. As Minister of Aviation from 1926 to 1933, he led two internationally heralded mass trans-Atlantic flights. When his aerial armada reached the U. S., Chicago honored him with a Balbo Avenue, New York staged a ticker-tape parade, and President Roosevelt invited him to lunch. As colonial governor from 1933 to 1940, Balbo transformed Libya from backward colony to model Italian province. To many, Italo Balbo seemed to embody a noble vision of Fascism and the New Italy.   [brief]
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Title: The family romance of the French Revolution
Author: Hunt, Lynn Avery
Published: University of California Press,  1992
Subjects: History | European History | French Studies | Gender Studies
Publisher's Description: This latest work from an author known for her contributions to the new cultural history is a multidisciplinary investigation of the foundations of modern politics. "Family Romance" was coined by Freud to describe the fantasy of being freed from one's family and joining one of higher social standing. Lynn Hunt uses the term broadly to describe the images of the familial order underlying revolutionary politics. In a wide-ranging account using novels, engravings, paintings, speeches, newspaper editorials, pornographic writing, and revolutionary legislation about the family, Hunt shows that politics were experienced through the grid of the family romance.   [brief]
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Title: Chinese history in economic perspective 
Author: Rawski, Thomas G 1943-
Published: University of California Press,  1992
Subjects: History | Asian History | China | Economics and Business
Publisher's Description: The essays assembled here represent a turning point in the study of Chinese economic history. Previous work has emphasized the institutional and social bases of economic change. These studies break new ground, bringing Western economic theory to the study of China's economy since the seventeenth cen . . . [more]
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Title: The fabrication of labor: Germany and Britain, 1640-1914 
Author: Biernacki, Richard 1956-
Published: University of California Press,  1997
Subjects: History | Sociology | Labor Studies | European History
Publisher's Description: This monumental study demonstrates the power of culture to define the meaning of labor. Drawing on massive archival evidence from Britain and Germany, as well as historical evidence from France and Italy, The Fabrication of Labor shows how the very nature of labor as a commodity differed fundamentally in different national contexts. A detailed comparative study of German and British wool textile mills reveals a basic difference in the way labor was understood, even though these industries developed in the same period, used similar machines, and competed in similar markets. These divergent definitions of the essential character of labor as a commodity influenced the entire industrial phenomenon, affecting experiences of industrial work, methods of remuneration, disciplinary techniques, forms of collective action, and even industrial architecture. Starting from a rigorous analysis of detailed archival materials, this study broadens out to analyze the contrasting developmental pathways to wage labor in Western Europe and offers a startling reinterpretation of theories of political economy put forward by Adam Smith and Karl Marx. In his brilliant cross-national study, Richard Biernacki profoundly reorients the analysis of how culture constitutes the very categories of economic life.   [brief]
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Title: Moral communities: the culture of class relations in the Russian printing industry, 1867-1907 
Author: Steinberg, Mark
Published: University of California Press,  1992
Subjects: History | European History | Russian and Eastern European Studies
Publisher's Description: This valuable study offers a rare perspective on the social and political crisis in late Imperial Russia. Mark D. Steinberg focuses on employers, supervisors, and workers in the printing industry as it evolved from a state-dependent handicraft to a capitalist industry. He explores class relations and the values, norms, and perceptions with which they were made meaningful. Using archival and printed sources, Steinberg examines economic changes, workplace relations, professional organizations, unions, strikes, and political activism, as well as shop customs, trade festivals, and everyday life. In rich detail he describes efforts to build a community of masters and men united by shared interests and moral norms. The collapse of this ideal in the face of growing class conflict is also explored, giving a full view of an important moment in Russian history.   [brief]
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Title: The reign of the phallus: sexual politics in ancient Athens
Author: Keuls, Eva C
Published: University of California Press,  1993
Subjects: Classics | History | Art and Architecture | Ancient History
Publisher's Description: At once daring and authoritative, this book offers a profusely illustrated history of sexual politics in ancient Athens.The phallus was pictured everywhere in ancient Athens: painted on vases, sculpted in marble, held aloft in gigantic form in public processions, and shown in stage comedies. This obsession with the phallus dominated almost every aspect of public life, influencing law, myth, and customs, affecting family life, the status of women, even foreign policy.This is the first book to draw together all the elements that made up the "reign of the phallus" - men's blatant claim to general dominance, the myths of rape and conquest of women, and the reduction of sex to a game of dominance and submission, both of women by men and of men by men.In her elegant and lucid text Eva Keuls not only examines the ideology and practices that underlay the reign of the phallus, but also uncovers an intense counter-movement - the earliest expressions of feminism and antimilitarism.Complementing the text are 345 reproductions of Athenian vase paintings. Some have been reproduced in a larger format and gathered in an appendix for easy reference and closer study. These revealing illustrations are a vivid demonstration that classical Athens was more sexually polarized and repressive of women than any other culture in Western history.   [brief]
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Title: Foundations of political economy: some early Tudor views on state and society
Author: Wood, Neal
Published: University of California Press,  1994
Subjects: History | Political Theory | Economics and Business
Publisher's Description: Conventional wisdom claims that the seventeenth century gave birth to the material and ideological forces that culminated in the Industrial Revolution and the rise of capitalism. Not true, according to Neal Wood, who argues that much earlier reformers - Dudley, Starkey, Brinklow, Latimer, Crowley, Becon, Lever, and Thomas Smith, as well as the better-known More and Fortescue - laid the groundwork by fashioning an economic conception of the state in response to social, economic and political conditions of England. Wood's innovative study of these early Tudor thinkers, who upheld the status quo yet condemned widespread poverty and suffering, will interest historians, political scientists, and social and political theorists.   [brief]
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Title: Preachers of the Italian ghetto 
Author: Ruderman, David B
Published: University of California Press,  1992
Subjects: Jewish Studies | Medieval History | European History | History
Publisher's Description: By the mid-sixteenth century, Jews in the cities of Italy were being crowded into compulsory ghettos as a result of the oppressive policies of Pope Paul IV and his successors.The sermons of Jewish preachers during this period provide a remarkable vantage point from which to view the early modern Jewish social and cultural landscape.In this eloquent collection, six leading scholars of Italian Jewish history reveal the important role of these preachers: men who served as a bridge between the ghetto and the Christian world outside, between old and new conventions, and between elite and popular modes of thought. The story of how they reflected and shaped the culture of their listeners, who felt the pressure of cramped urban life as well as of political, economic, and religious persecution, is finally beginning to be told. Through the words of the Italian ghetto preachers, we discover a richly textured panorama of Jewish life more than 400 years ago.   [brief]
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Title: Windows on the house of Islam: Muslim sources on spirituality and religious life
Author: Renard, John 1944-
Published: University of California Press,  1998
Subjects: Religion | Middle Eastern Studies | History | Islam
Publisher's Description: Over the centuries and across the globe, Muslim authors and artists have given moving testimony to their experience of being members of the Islamic community. Their many vantage points come together in this collection, one that represents major Islamic groups from the past through the present and covers a range of themes essential to understanding Islamic spirituality and religious life. More than thirty leading Islam scholars present translations originating from a dozen languages, including Arabic, Persian, Chinese, and Indonesian. Texts include samples of virtually every major literary form of significance to the Muslim faith: the Qur'an, hadith, scriptural commentary, letters, treatises, lyric and didactic poetry, hagiography, historical chronicle, aphorism, endowment deeds, and personal diary entries. In addition, over five dozen illustrations thematically document a full range of artistic forms and historical periods, from ritual objects and architecture to manuscripts of religious texts. This volume and its companion, John Renard's 1996 book, Seven Doors to Islam , are the only books available that integrate such a wide range of Islamic literary and visual forms. Together they offer a superb introduction to the primary religious sources as well as a general understanding of Islamic spirituality and culture.   [brief]
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Title: Twenty thousand roads: women, movement, and the West
Author: Scharff, Virginia
Published: University of California Press,  2002
Subjects: History | Women's Studies | California and the West
Publisher's Description: From Sacagawea's travels with Lewis and Clark to rock groupie Pamela Des Barres's California trips, women have moved across the American West with profound consequences for the people and places they encounter. Virginia Scharff revisits a grand theme of United States history - our restless, relentless westward movement--but sets out in new directions, following women's trails from the early nineteenth to the late twentieth centuries. In colorful, spirited stories, she weaves a lyrical reconsideration of the processes that created, gave meaning to, and ultimately shattered the West. Twenty Thousand Roads introduces a cast of women mapping the world on their own terms, often crossing political and cultural boundaries defined by male-dominated institutions and perceptions. Scharff examines the faint traces left by Sacagawea and revisits Susan Magoffin's famed honeymoon journey down the Santa Fe Trail. We also meet educated women like historian Grace Hebard and government extension agent Fabiola Cabeza de Baca, who mapped the West with different voyages and visions. Scharff introduces women whose lives gave shape to the forces of gender, race, region, and modernity; participants in exploration, war, politics, empire, and struggles for social justice; and movers and shakers of everyday family life. This book powerfully and poetically shows us that to understand the American West, we must examine the lives of women who both built and resisted American expansion. Scharff remaps western history as she reveals how moving women have shaped our past, present, and future.   [brief]
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Title: Making Muslim space in North America and Europe 
Author: Metcalf, Barbara Daly 1941-
Published: University of California Press,  1996
Subjects: Anthropology | History | Islam | Middle Eastern Studies | Postcolonial Studies
Publisher's Description: Focusing on the private and public use of space, this volume explores the religious life of the new Muslim communities in North America and Europe. Unlike most studies of immigrant groups, these essays concentrate on cultural practices and expressions of everyday life rather than on the political issues that dominate today's headlines. The authors emphasize the cultural strength and creativity of communities that draw upon Islamic symbols and practices to define "Muslim space" against the background of a non-Muslim environment.The range of perspectives is broad, encompassing middle-class professionals, mosque congregations, factory workers in France and the north of England, itinerant African traders, and prison inmates in New York. The truism that "Islam is a religion of the word" takes on concrete meaning as these disparate communities find ways to elaborate word-centered ritual and to have the visual and aural presence of sacred words in the spaces they inhabit.The volume includes 46 black-and-white photographs that illustrate Muslim populations in Edmonton, Philadelphia, the Green Haven Correction Facility, Manhattan, Marseilles, Berlin, and London, among other places. The focus on space directs attention to the new kinds of boundaries and consciousness that exist not only for these Muslim populations, but for people from all backgrounds in today's ever more integrated world.   [brief]
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Title: From colonia to community: the history of Puerto Ricans in New York City
Author: Sánchez Korrol, Virginia
Published: University of California Press,  1994
Subjects: History | Latino Studies | United States History | Urban Studies
Publisher's Description: First published in 1983, this book remains the only full-length study documenting the historical development of the Puerto Rican community in the United States. Expanded to bring it up to the present, Virginia Sánchez Korrol's work traces the growth of the early Puerto Rican settlements - "colonias" . . . [more]
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Title: Marriage and inequality in Chinese society 
Author: Watson, Rubie S. (Rubie Sharon) 1945-
Published: University of California Press,  1991
Subjects: History | Asian History | Cultural Anthropology | China | Gender Studies
Publisher's Description: Until now our understanding of marriage in China has been based primarily on observations made during the twentieth century. The research of ten eminent scholars presented here provides a new vision of marriage in Chinese history, exploring the complex interplay between marriage and the social, poli . . . [more]
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Title: "Ronald Reagan," the movie: and other episodes in political demonology
Author: Rogin, Michael Paul
Published: University of California Press,  1988
Subjects: History | Politics | Popular Culture | United States History
Publisher's Description: The fear of the subversive has governed American politics, from the racial conflicts of the early republic to the Hollywood anti-Communism of Ronald Reagan. Political monsters - the Indian cannibal, the black rapist, the demon rum, the bomb-throwing anarchist, the many-tentacled Communist conspiracy, the agents of international terrorism - are familiar figures in the dream life that so often dominates American political consciousness. What are the meanings and sources of these demons? Why does the American political imagination conjure them up? Michael Rogin answers these questions by examining the American countersubversive tradition.   [brief]
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