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China's Cosmopolitan Empire: The Tang Dynasty
Mark Edward Lewis
The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press (June, 2009)
The Tang dynasty is often called China’s “golden age,” a period of commercial, religious, and cultural connections from Korea and Japan to the Persian Gulf, and a time of unsurpassed literary creativity. Mark Lewis captures a dynamic era in which the empire reached its greatest geographical extent under Chinese rule, painting and ceramic arts flourished, women played a major role both as rulers and in the economy, and China produced its finest lyric poets in Wang Wei, Li Bo, and Du Fu.
The Chinese engaged in extensive trade on sea and land. Merchants from Inner Asia settled in the capital, while Chinese entrepreneurs set off for the wider world, the beginning of a global diaspora. The emergence of an economically and culturally dominant south that was controlled from a northern capital set a pattern for the rest of Chinese imperial history. Poems celebrated the glories of the capital, meditated on individual loneliness in its midst, and described heroic young men and beautiful women who filled city streets and bars.
Despite the romantic aura attached to the Tang, it was not a time of unending peace. In 756, General An Lushan led a revolt that shook the country to its core, weakening the government to such a degree that by the early tenth century, regional warlordism gripped many areas, heralding the decline of the Great Tang.
Islam and Social Change in French West Africa : History of an Emancipatory Community
Sean Hanretta
Cambridge University Press (March 23, 2009)
Exploring the history and religious community of a group of Muslim Sufi mystics who came largely from socially marginal backgrounds in colonial French West Africa, this study shows the relationship between religious, social, and economic change in the region. It highlights the role that intellectuals - including not only elite men, but also women, slaves, and the poor - played in shaping social and cultural change and illuminates the specific religious ideas on which Muslims drew and the political contexts that gave their efforts meaning. In contrast to depictions that emphasize the importance of international networks and anti-modern reaction in twentieth-century Islamic reform, this book claims that, in West Africa, such movements were driven by local forces and constituted only the most recent round in a set of centuries-old debates about the best way for pious people to confront social injustice. It argues that traditional historical methods prevent an appreciation of Muslim intellectual history in Africa by misunderstanding the nature of information gathering during colonial rule and misconstruing the relationship between documents and oral history.
China Between Empires: The Northern and Southern Dynasties
Mark Edward Lewis
The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press (February, 2009)
After the collapse of the Han dynasty in the third century CE, China divided along a north-south line. Mark Lewis traces the changes that both underlay and resulted from this split in a period that saw the geographic redefinition of China, more engagement with the outside world, significant changes to family life, developments in the literary and social arenas, and the introduction of new religions.
The Yangzi River valley arose as the rice-producing center of the country. Literature moved beyond the court and capital to depict local culture, and newly emerging social spaces included the garden, temple, salon, and country villa. The growth of self-defined genteel families expanded the notion of the elite, moving it away from the traditional great Han families identified mostly by material wealth. Trailing the rebel movements that toppled the Han, the new faiths of Daoism and Buddhism altered every aspect of life, including the state, kinship structures, and the economy.
By the time China was reunited by the Sui dynasty in 589 ce, the elite had been drawn into the state order, and imperial power had assumed a more transcendent nature. The Chinese were incorporated into a new world system in which they exchanged goods and ideas with states that shared a common Buddhist religion. The centuries between the Han and the Tang thus had a profound and permanent impact on the Chinese world.
Diverse Nations: Explorations in the History of Racial and Ethnic Pluralism
George M. Fredrickson
Paradigm Publishers (January 30, 2009)
One of the world’s leading historians of race relations, George Fredrickson in his newest book probes the history of racial and ethnic diversity in the United States and other parts of the world. Diverse Nations explores recent interpretations of slavery and race relations in the United States and introduces comparative perspectives on Europe, South Africa, and Brazil. Notably, the book features groundbreaking work comparing ethnoracial pluralism in France and the United States. In contrast to the similarities of race relations in the United States and South Africa, which both drew rigid domestic color lines, the United States and France have historically diverged greatly in their approaches to racial difference. Yet both are influenced by a common heritage of revolutionary republicanism, extensive immigration, and cultural pluralism. Fredrickson’s rich comparisons provide stimulating new insights into the continuing impacts of slavery and beliefs about race upon our increasingly pluralistic societies.
George M. Fredrickson was the Edgar E. Robinson Professor of U. S. History (Emeritus) at Stanford. His many books include the prize-winning White Supremacy: A Comparative Study in American and South African History and Racism: A Short History, which has been translated into five languages.
Italy's Eighteenth Century: Gender and Culture in the Age of the Grand Tour
Edited by Paula Findlen, Wendy Wassyng Roworth, and Catherine M. Sama
Stanford University Press, 2009
In the age of the Grand Tour, foreigners flocked to Italy to gawk at its ruins and paintings, enjoy its salons and cafés, attend the opera, and revel in their own discovery of its past. But they also marveled at the people they saw, both male and female. In an era in which castrati were "rock stars," men served women as cicisbei, and dandified Englishmen became macaroni, Italy was perceived to be a place where men became women. The great publicity surrounding female poets, journalists, artists, anatomists, and scientists, and the visible roles for such women in salons, academies, and universities in many Italian cities also made visitors wonder whether women had become men. Such images, of course, were stereotypes, but they were nonetheless grounded in a reality that was unique to the Italian peninsula. This volume illuminates the social and cultural landscape of eighteenth-century Italy by exploring how questions of gender in music, art, literature, science, and medicine shaped perceptions of Italy in the age of the Grand Tour.
Rosenfeld's Lives: Fame, Oblivion, and the Furies of Writing
Steven J. Zipperstein
Yale University Press, 2009
Born in Chicago in 1918, the prodigiously gifted and erudite Isaac Rosenfeld was anointed a “genius” upon the publication of his “luminescent” novel, Passage from Home and was expected to surpass even his closest friend and rival, Saul Bellow. Yet when felled by a heart attack at the age of thirty-eight, Rosenfeld had published relatively little, his life reduced to a metaphor for literary failure.
In this deeply contemplative book, Steven J. Zipperstein seeks to reclaim Rosenfeld's legacy by “opening up” his work. Zipperstein examines for the first time the “small mountain” of unfinished manuscripts the writer left behind, as well as his fiercely candid journals and letters. In the process, Zipperstein unearths a turbulent life that was obsessively grounded in a profound commitment to the ideals of the writing life.
Rosenfeld’s Lives is a fascinating exploration of literary genius and aspiration and the paradoxical power of literature to elevate and to enslave. It illuminates the cultural and political tensions of post-war America, Jewish intellectual life of the era, and—most poignantly—the struggle at the heart of any writer’s life.
Guardians of Islam
Kathryn A. Miller
Columbia University Press, 2008
Muslim enclaves within non-Islamic polities are commonly believed to have been beleaguered communities undergoing relentless cultural and religious decline. Cut off from the Islamic world, these Muslim groups, it is assumed, passively yielded to political, social, and economic forces of assimilation and acculturation before finally accepting Christian dogma.
Kathryn A. Miller radically reconceptualizes what she calls the exclave experience of medieval Muslim minorities. By focusing on the legal scholars (faqihs) of fifteenth-century Aragonese Muslim communities and translating little-known and newly discovered texts, she unearths a sustained effort to connect with Muslim coreligionaries and preserve practice and belief in the face of Christian influences. Devoted to securing and disseminating Islamic knowledge, these local authorities intervened in Christian courts on behalf of Muslims, provided Arabic translations, and taught and advised other Muslims. Miller follows the activities of the faqihs, their dialogue with Islamic authorities in nearby Muslim polities, their engagement with Islamic texts, and their pursuit of traditional ideals of faith. She demonstrates that these local scholars played a critical role as cultural mediators, creating scholarly networks and communal solidarity despite living in an environment dominated by Christianity.
Asian American Art: A History, 1850 - 1970
Edited by Gordon H. Chang, Mark Johnson, and Paul Karlstrom
Stanford University Press, 2008
Asian American Art: A History, 1850-1970 is the first comprehensive study of the lives and artistic production of artists of Asian ancestry active in the United States before 1970. The publication features original essays by ten leading scholars, biographies of more than 150 artists, and over 400 reproductions of artwork, ephemera, and images of the artists.
Aside from a few artists such as Dong Kingman, Yasuo Kuniyoshi, Isamu Noguchi, and Yun Gee, artists of Asian ancestry have received inadequate historical attention, even though many of them received wide critical acclaim during their productive years. This pioneering work recovers the extraordinarily impressive artistic production of numerous Asian Americans, and offers richly informed interpretations of a long-neglected art history. To unravel the complexity of Asian American art expression and its vital place in American art, the texts consider aesthetics, the social structures of art production and criticism, and national and international historical contexts.
Spies in Arabia
Priya Satia
Oxford University Press, 2008
At the dawn of the twentieth century, British intelligence agents began to venture in increasing numbers to the Arab lands of the Ottoman Empire, a region of crucial geopolitical importance spanning present-day Iraq, Jordan, Syria, and Saudi Arabia. They were drawn by the twin objectives of securing the land route to India and finding adventure and spiritualism in a mysterious and ancient land. But these competing desires created a dilemma: how were they to discreetly and patriotically gather facts in a region they were drawn to for its legendary inscrutability and by the promise of fame and escape from Britain?
In this groundbreaking book, Priya Satia tracks the intelligence community's tactical grappling with this problem and the myriad cultural, institutional, and political consequences of their methodological choices during and after the Great War. She tells the story of how an imperial state in thrall to the cultural notions of equivocal agents and beset by an equally captivated and increasingly assertive mass democracy invented a wholly new style of "covert empire" centered on the world's first brutal aerial surveillance regime in Iraq. Drawing on a wealth of archival sources--from the fictional to the recently declassified--this book explains how Britons reconciled genuine ethical scruples with the actual violence of their Middle Eastern empire. As it vividly demonstrates how imperialism was made fit for an increasingly democratic and anti-imperial world, what emerges is a new interpretation of the military, cultural, and political legacies of the Great War and of the British Empire in the twentieth century.
Unpacking the romantic fascination with "Arabia" as the land of espionage, Spies in Arabia presents a stark tale of poetic ambition, war, terror, and failed redemption--and the prehistory of our present discontents.
Where Have All the Soldiers Gone?: The Transformation of
Modern Europe
James J. Sheehan
Houghton Mifflin Company, 2008
An eminent historian offers a sweeping look at Europe's tumultuous twentieth century, showing how the rejection of violence after World War II transformed a continent
In the last decade we've seen an ever-widening rift between the United States and Europe, most visibly over Iraq. But as James J. Sheehan reminds us in his timely book, it wasn't always thus. How did America and Europe come to take such different paths?
In Where Have All the Soldiers Gone? Stanford historian Sheehan charts what is perhaps the most radical shift in Europe's history. For centuries, nations defined themselves by their willingness and ability to wage war. But after World War II, Europe began to redefine statehood, rejecting ballooning defense budgets in favor of material well-being, social stability, and economic growth. Sheehan reveals how and why this happened, and what it means for America as well as the rest of the world.
Succinct yet broad in scope, Sheehan's authoritative history provides much-needed context for understanding the fractured era in which we live.
The First Day of the Blitz
By Peter Stansky
Yale University Press, 2007
On September 7, 1940, the long-feared and anticipated attack by the German Luftwaffe plunged London into a cauldron of fire and devastation. This compelling book recreates that day in all its horror, using rich archival sources and first-hand accounts, many never before published. Eminent historian Peter Stansky weaves together the stories of people who recorded their experiences of the opening hours of the Blitz. Then, exploring more deeply, the author examines what that critical day meant to the nation at the time, and what it came to mean in following years.
Much of the future of Britain was determined in the first twelve hours of bombing, Stansky contends. The Blitz set in motion a range of responses that contributed to ultimate victory over Germany and to a transformation of British society. The wave of terror, though designed to quash morale, instead inspired stoicism, courage, and a new camaraderie. The tragic London bombing can reveal much of relevance to our own violent times, Stansky concludes: both the effectiveness of modern terror and its ultimate failure are made powerfully clear by the events of September 7, 1940.
The Essential Feminist Reader
Edited by Estelle B. Freedman
Modern Library, 2007
The Essential Feminist Reader is the first anthology to present the full scope of feminist history. Prizewinning historian Estelle B. Freedman brings decades of teaching experience and scholarship to her selections, which span more than five centuries. Moving beyond standard texts by English and American thinkers, this collection features primary source material from around the globe, including short works of fiction and drama, political manifestos, and the work of less well-known writers.
Freedman’s cogent Introduction assesses the challenges facing feminism, while her accessible, lively commentary contextualizes each piece. The Essential Feminist Reader is a vital addition to feminist scholarship, and an invaluable resource for anyone interested in the history of women.
Seascapes: Maritime Histories, Littoral Cultures, and Transoceanic Exchanges
Edited by Jerry H. Bentley, Renate Bridenthal and Karen Wigen
University of Hawaii Press, 2007
The world's seas and oceans have played roles of great significance in world history, serving variously as highways of trade, routes of migration, lifelines of empires, spawning grounds of creole cultures, and venues of opportunity for pirates and smugglers. Yet historians have only recently begun to chart the experiences of maritime regions in rich detail and penetrate the historical processes at work there. Seascapes makes a major contribution to these efforts by bringing together original scholarship on historical issues arising from maritime regions around the world.
The essays presented here take a variety of approaches. One group examines the material, cultural, and intellectual constructs that inform and explain historical experiences of maritime regions. Another set discusses efforts--some more successful than others--to impose political and military control over maritime regions. A third group focuses on issues of social history such as labor organization, information flows, and the development of political consciousness among subaltern populations. The final essays deal with pirates and efforts to control them in Mediterranean, Japanese, and Atlantic waters.
Seascapes makes several notable contributions to historical scholarship. It constitutes a rich sampler of recent scholarship on the history of sea and ocean basins and makes clear that activities pursued by human groups over maritime spaces demand the historian's attention as much as those carried out on land. The essays articulate new regional and global geographies that complement the land-based geography that informs most historical scholarship. They chart several of the very different ways human groups have exploited the possibilities offered by different maritime environments. In doing so, they reinforce the point that historical scholarship must pay close attention to the particularities of individual regions. Finally, the volume enriches understanding of the global past by articulating maritime perspectives on the past and insisting that historians consider relationships between lands and seas in their efforts to understand the world and its development through time.
The Mirror of Antiquity: American Women and the Classical Tradition, 1750-1900
by Caroline Winterer
Cornell University Press, 2007
In The Mirror of Antiquity, Caroline Winterer uncovers the lost world of American women's classicism during its glory days from the eighteenth through the nineteenth centuries. Overturning the widely held belief that classical learning and political ideals were relevant only to men, she follows the lives of four generations of American women through their diaries, letters, books, needlework, and drawings, demonstrating how classicism was at the center of their experience as mothers, daughters, and wives. Importantly, she pays equal attention to women from the North and from the South, and to the ways that classicism shaped the lives of black women in slavery and freedom.
Using both texts and material culture, Winterer exposes the neoclassical world of furnishings, art, and fashion created in part through networks dominated by elite women. Many of these women were at the center of the national experience. Here readers will find Abigail Adams, teaching her children Latin and signing her letters as Portia, the wife of the Roman senator Brutus; the Massachusetts slave Phillis Wheatley, writing poems in imitation of her favorite books, Alexander Pope's Iliad and Odyssey; Dolley Madison, giving advice on Greek taste and style to the U.S. Capitol's architect, Benjamin Latrobe; and the abolitionist and feminist Lydia Maria Child, who showed Americans that modern slavery had its roots in the slave societies of Greece and Rome.
The Early Chinese Empires: Qin and Han (History of Imperial China)
By Mark Edward Lewis
Belknap Press, 2007
In 221 bc the First Emperor of Qin unified the lands that would become the heart of a Chinese empire. Though forged by conquest, this vast domain depended for its political survival on a fundamental reshaping of Chinese culture. With this informative book, we are present at the creation of an ancient imperial order whose major features would endure for two millennia.
The Qin and Han constitute the "classical period" of Chinese history--a role played by the Greeks and Romans in the West. Mark Edward Lewis highlights the key challenges faced by the court officials and scholars who set about governing an empire of such scale and diversity of peoples. He traces the drastic measures taken to transcend, without eliminating, these regional differences: the invention of the emperor as the divine embodiment of the state; the establishment of a common script for communication and a state-sponsored canon for the propagation of Confucian ideals; the flourishing of the great families, whose domination of local society rested on wealth, landholding, and elaborate kinship structures; the demilitarization of the interior; and the impact of non-Chinese warrior-nomads in setting the boundaries of an emerging Chinese identity.
The first of a six-volume series on the history of imperial China, The Early Chinese Empires illuminates many formative events in China's long history of imperialism--events whose residual influence can still be discerned today.
Genesis Redux: Essays in the History and Philosophy of Science
Edited by Jessica Riskin
University of Chicago Press, 2007
Since antiquity, philosophers and engineers have tried to take life’s measure by reproducing it. Aiming to reenact Creation, at least in part, these experimenters have hoped to understand the links between body and spirit, matter and mind, mechanism and consciousness. Genesis Redux examines moments from this centuries-long experimental tradition: efforts to simulate life in machinery, to synthesize life out of material parts, and to understand living beings by comparison with inanimate mechanisms.
Jessica Riskin collects seventeen essays from distinguished scholars in several fields. These studies offer an unexpected and far-reaching result: attempts to create artificial life have rarely been driven by an impulse to reduce life and mind to machinery. On the contrary, designers of synthetic creatures have generally assumed a role for something nonmechanical. The history of artificial life is thus also a history of theories of soul and intellect.
Taking a historical approach to a modern quandary, Genesis Redux is essential reading for historians and philosophers of science and technology, scientists and engineers working in artificial life and intelligence, and anyone engaged in evaluating these world-changing projects.
Intermediaries, Interpreters, and Clerks African Employees in the Making of Colonial Africa
Edited by Benjamin N. Lawrance, Emily Lynn Osborn, and Richard L. Roberts
University of Wisconsin Press, 2006
As a young man in South Africa, Nelson Mandela aspired to be an interpreter or clerk, noting in his autobiography that "a career as a civil servant was a glittering prize for an African." Africans in the lower echelons of colonial bureaucracy often held positions of little official authority, but in practice the occupants of these positions functioned as hidden lynchpins of colonial rule. As the primary intermediaries among European colonial officials, African chiefs, and subject populations, these men (and a few women) could manipulate the intersections of power, authority, and knowledge at the center of colonial society.
By uncovering the role of African civil servants in the construction, function, and legal apparatus of colonial states, the essays in this volume highlight a new perspective. They offer important insights on hegemony, collaboration, and resistance, structures and changes in colonial rule, the role of language and education, the production of knowledge and expertise in colonial settings, and the impact of colonization in dividing African societies by gender, race, status, and class.
Brazil since 1980
Francisco Vidal Luna and Herbert S. Klein
Cambridge University Press, 2006
This is a general survey of Brazilian society, economy, and political system since 1980. It describes the basic changes occurring as Brazil was transformed from a predominantly rural and closed economy under military rule into a modern democratic, industrial and urbanized society, with an extraordinary world class commercial agriculture in the past 60 years. In this period, Brazil passed from a pre-modern high fertility and mortality society to a modern low fertility and mortality one, the economy approached hyper inflation many times, and it abandoned a policy of protected industrialization to an economy opened to world trade. The advances and the failures of these changes are examined for the impact on questions of growth and equality. The book is designed as a basic introduction to contemporary Brazil from a recent historical perspective and is one of the first such comprehensive surveys of recent Brazilian history and development in any language.
From Silver to Cocaine: Latin American Commodity Chains and the Building of the World Economy, 1500-2000
Edited by Zephyr Frank, Carlos Marichal and Steven Topik
Duke University Press, 2006
Demonstrating that globalization is a centuries-old phenomenon, From Silver to Cocaine examines the commodity chains that have connected producers in Latin America with consumers around the world for five hundred years. In clear, accessible essays, historians from Latin America, England, and the United States trace the paths of many of Latin America’s most important exports: coffee, bananas, rubber, sugar, tobacco, silver, henequen (fiber), fertilizers, cacao, cocaine, indigo, and cochineal (insects used to make dye). Each contributor follows a specific commodity from its inception, through its development and transport, to its final destination in the hands of consumers. The essays are arranged in chronological order, according to when the production of a particular commodity became significant to Latin America’s economy. Some—such as silver, sugar, and tobacco—were actively produced and traded in the sixteenth century; others—such as bananas and rubber—only at the end of the nineteenth century; and cocaine only in the twentieth.
By focusing on changing patterns of production and consumption over time, the contributors reconstruct complex webs of relationships and economic processes, highlighting Latin America’s central and interactive place in the world economy. They show how changes in coffee consumption habits, clothing fashions, drug usage, or tire technologies in Europe, Asia, and the Americas reverberate through Latin American commodity chains in profound ways. The social and economic outcomes of the continent’s export experience have been mixed. By analyzing the dynamics of a wide range of commodities over a five-hundred-year period, From Silver to Cocaine highlights this diversity at the same time that it provides a basis for comparison and points to new ways of doing global history.
The Worlds of S. An-Sky: A Russian Jewish Intellectual at the Turn of the Century with CD
Edited by Gabriella Safran and Steven J. Zipperstein
Stanford University Press; Book & CD edition, 2006
Shloyme-Zanvl Rappoport, known as An-sky (1863-1920), the author of the best known play in the Hebrew and Yiddish languages, “The Dybbuk,” was a figure of immense versatility and also ambiguity in Russian and Jewish intellectual, literary, and political spheres. He was a leading Russian populist; he was the author of the poem adopted as the anthem of the Jewish Socialist Labor Bund; he is credited with being the founder of the field of Jewish ethnography; and he wrote one of the most influential works of Jewish catastrophe literature in modern times, his masterpiece “Hurbn Galitsye,” on the travails of East European Jews in the First World War.
This volume is the most complete examination of An-sky ever produced. It draws together leading historians, ethnographers, literary scholars, and others in a far-ranging, multidisciplinary exploration. It also contains numerous photographs culled from archives in the former Soviet Union, a superb English translation of an early Russian draft—among the very first—of “The Dybbuk,” and a timeline that covers all of An-sky’s peripatetic life. Finally, it includes a compact disk combining material drawn from An-sky’s own 1912-14 field recordings of Jewish songs, together with contemporary renditions, recorded at Stanford, of the Russian and Yiddish music that An-sky wrote, collected, and heard.
Includes a CD of An-sky’s music, in Russian and Yiddish
An Empire Divided: Religion, Republicanism, and the Making of French Colonialism, 1880-1914
J.P. Daughton
Oxford University Press, 2006
Between 1880 and 1914, tens of thousands of men and women left France for distant religious missions, driven by the desire to spread the word of Jesus Christ, combat Satan, and convert the world's pagans to Catholicism. But they were not the only ones with eyes fixed on foreign shores. Just as the Catholic missionary movement reached its apex, the young, staunchly secular Third Republic launched the most aggressive campaign of colonial expansion in French history. Missionaries and republicans abroad knew they had much to gain from working together, but their starkly different motivations regularly led them to view one another with resentment, distrust, and even fear.
In An Empire Divided, J.P. Daughton tells the story of how troubled relations between Catholic missionaries and a host of republican critics shaped colonial policies, Catholic perspectives, and domestic French politics in the tumultuous decades before the First World War. With case studies on Indochina, Polynesia, and Madagascar, An Empire Divided--the first book to examine the role of religious missionaries in shaping French colonialism--challenges the long-held view that French colonizing and "civilizing" goals were shaped by a distinctly secular republican ideology built on Enlightenment ideals. By exploring the experiences of Catholic missionaries, one of the largest groups of French men and women working abroad, Daughton argues that colonial policies were regularly wrought in the fires of religious discord--discord that indigenous communities exploited in responding to colonial rule.
After decades of conflict, Catholics and republicans in the empire ultimately buried many of their disagreements by embracing a notion of French civilization that awkwardly melded both Catholic and republican ideals. But their entente came at a price, with both sides compromising long-held and much-cherished traditions for the benefit of establishing and maintaining authority. Focusing on the much-neglected intersection of politics, religion, and imperialism, Daughton offers a new understanding of both the nature of French culture and politics at the fin de siecle, as well as the power of the colonial experience to reshape European's most profound beliefs.
For Prophet and Tsar: Islam and Empire in Russia and Central Asia
Robert D. Crews
Harvard University Press, 2006
Russia occupies a unique position in the Muslim world. Unlike any other non-Islamic state, it has ruled Muslim populations for over five hundred years. Though Russia today is plagued by its unrelenting war in Chechnya, Russia's approach toward Islam once yielded stability. In stark contrast to the popular "clash of civilizations" theory that sees Islam inevitably in conflict with the West, Robert D. Crews reveals the remarkable ways in which Russia constructed an empire with broad Muslim support.
In the eighteenth century, Catherine the Great inaugurated a policy of religious toleration that made Islam an essential pillar of Orthodox Russia. For ensuing generations, tsars and their police forces supported official Muslim authorities willing to submit to imperial directions in exchange for defense against brands of Islam they deemed heretical and destabilizing. As a result, Russian officials assumed the powerful but often awkward role of arbitrator in disputes between Muslims. And just as the state became a presence in the local mosque, Muslims became inextricably integrated into the empire and shaped tsarist will in Muslim communities stretching from the Volga River to Central Asia.
For Prophet and Tsar draws on police and court records, and Muslim petitions, denunciations, and clerical writings--not accessible prior to 1991--to unearth the fascinating relationship between an empire and its subjects. As America and Western Europe debate how best to secure the allegiances of their Muslim populations, Crews offers a unique and critical historical vantage point.
Feminism, Sexuality, and Politics
by Estelle B. Freedman
University of North Carolina Press, 2006
One of a small group of feminist pioneers in the historical profession, Estelle B. Freedman teaches and writes about women's history with a passion informed by her feminist values. Over the past thirty years, she has produced a body of work in which scholarship and politics have never been mutually exclusive. This collection brings together eleven essays--eight previously published and three new--that document the evolving relationship between academic feminism and political feminism as Freedman has studied and lived it.
Following an introduction that presents a map of the personal and intellectual trajectory of Freedman's work, the first section of essays, on the origins and strategies of women's activism in U.S. history, reiterates the importance of valuing women in a society that has long devalued their contributions. The second section, on the maintenance of sexual boundaries, explores the malleability of both sexual identities and sexual politics. Underlying the collection is an inquiry into the changing meanings of gender, sexuality, and politics during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries along with a concern for applying the insights of women's history broadly, from the classroom to the courthouse.
The Struggle for Sovereignty: Palestine and Israel, 1993-2005
By Joel Beinin & Rebecca L. Stein,
Stanford University Press 2006
After the 1993 Oslo accords, people across the world anticipated the onset of peace and an end to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. For Israelis, the accords generated massive economic growth and a sense of security. For Palestinians in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, they led to a dramatic rise in poverty and unemployment due to a complex array of closures, militarized checkpoints, and bypass roads. In 2000, popular Palestinian rage with the new shape of the Israeli occupation erupted in a second uprising, or intifada. This volume examines the dramatic political changes in Palestine and Israel, U.S. foreign policy, social movements and political activism, and the interplay between cultural and political-economic processes form the Oslo accords through the second intifada and the death of Yasser Arafat.
Black Cultural Traffic: Crossroads in Global Performance and Popular Culture
Edited by Harry J. Elam, Jr. and Kennell Jackson
The University of Michigan Press 2005
Black Cultural Traffic traces how blackness travels globally in performance, engaging the work of an international and interdisciplinary mix of scholars, critics, and practicing artists. The book's essays provide nuanced and complex perspectives on black culture—not as a static set of shared beliefs and customs but as something that is contingent and dynamic. The essays engage with critical issues such as circulation, cultural appropriation, commodification, commercialization, and hybridity as they take up subjects that include television, hip-hop, R&B, gospel, film, theater, fashion, and pop music celebrities in Africa, Europe, and the United States. The book's engaging combination of scholarship with artists' statements will appeal to anyone interested in understanding the circulation and multidirectional movements of black culture.
The Flood Myths of Early China
By Mark Edward Lewis
SUNY Press 2006
Early Chinese ideas about the construction of an ordered human space received narrative form in a set of stories dealing with the rescue of the world and its inhabitants from a universal flood. This book demonstrates how early Chinese stories of the re-creation of the world from a watery chaos provided principles underlying such fundamental units as the state, lineage, the married couple, and even the human body. These myths also supplied a charter for the major political and social institutions of Warring States (481–221 BC) and early imperial (220 BC–AD 220) China.
In some versions of the tales, the flood was triggered by rebellion, while other versions linked the taming of the flood with the creation of the institution of a lineage, and still others linked the taming to the process in which the divided principles of the masculine and the feminine were joined in the married couple to produce an ordered household. While availing themselves of earlier stories and of central religious rituals of the period, these myths transformed earlier divinities or animal spirits into rulers or ministers and provided both etiologies and legitimation for the emerging political and social institutions that culminated in the creation of a unitary empire.
The Construction of Space in Early China
By Mark Edward Lewis
State University of New York Press, 2005
This book examines the formation of the Chinese empire through its reorganization and reinterpretation of its basic spatial units: the human body, the household, the city, the region, and the world. The central theme of the book is the way all these forms of ordered space were reshaped by the project of unification and how, at the same time, that unification was constrained and limited by the necessary survival of the units on which it was based. Consequently, as Mark Edward Lewis shows, each level of spatial organization could achieve order and meaning only within an encompassing, superior whole: the body within the household, the household within the lineage and state, the city within the region, and the region within the world empire, while each level still contained within itself the smaller units from which it was formed. The unity that was the empire's highest goal avoided collapse back into the original chaos of nondistinction only by preserving within itself the very divisions on the basis of family or region that it claimed to transcend.
The Contest for Knowledge: Debates over Women's Learning in Eighteenth-Century Italy
Edited and translated by Rebecca Messbarger and Paula Findlen
The University of Chicago Press, 2005
At a time when women were generally excluded from scholarly discourse in the intellectual centers of Europe, four extraordinary female letterate proved their parity as they lectured in prominent scientific and literary academies and published in respected journals. During the Italian Enlightenment, Maria Gaetana Agnesi, Giuseppa Eleonora Barbapiccola, Diamante Medaglia Faini, and Aretafila Savini de' Rossi were afforded unprecedented deference in academic debates and epitomized the increasing ability of women to influence public discourse.
The Contest for Knowledge reveals how these four women used the methods and themes of their male counterparts to add their voices to the vigorous and prolific debate over the education of women during the eighteenth century. In the texts gathered here, the women discuss the issues they themselves thought most urgent for the equality of women in Italian society specifically and in European culture more broadly. Their thoughts on this important subject reveal how crucial the eighteenth century was in the long history of debates about women in the academy.
Litigants and Households: African Disputes and Colonial Courts in the French Soudan, 1895-1912
By Richard Roberts
Heinemann 2005
Why did Africans bring their most intimate domestic disputes to the newly created native courts in the period after 1905? And what do these disputes tell us about everyday life and social change? To answer these questions, Roberts uses all 2,062 civil disputes heard at the provincial level native courts for four districts between 1905 and 1912. He concludes that changes in social relations occurring at a time of accelerated change associated with colonial conquest and the end of slavery interacted with institutional changes, namely the creation of the new native courts, to produce discernible patterns of litigation. Moreover, these patterns of litigation point to “trouble spots” in African society, thus providing a lens into the most ordinary aspects of daily life.
This book is divided into two parts: following an important theoretical and methodological introduction to the use of the court records as social history, the first two chapters examine the context in which the colonial legal system came into being in 1903. The second part examines the evidence generated by the court records into the struggles between former slaves and former masters in the immediate aftermath of the end of slavery, the “trouble spots” of marriage and divorce, bridewealth disputes, disputes over new forms of property in the post-slave holding era and disputes over inheritance. These chapters concentrate on the cases brought by women or dealing with women.
The Ancient Economy: Evidence and Models
Edited by J. G. Manning and Ian Morris
Stanford University Press, 2005
Historians and archaeologists normally assume that the economies of ancient Greece and Rome between about 1000 BC and AD 500 were distinct from those of Egypt and the Near East. However, very different kinds of evidence survive from each of these areas, and specialists have, as a result, developed very different methods of analysis for each region. This book marks the first time that historians and archaeologists of Egypt, the Near East, Greece, and Rome have come together with sociologists, political scientists, and economists, to ask whether the differences between accounts of these regions reflect real economic differences in the past, or are merely a function of variations in the surviving evidence and the intellectual traditions that have grown up around it. The contributors describe the types of evidence available and demonstrate the need for clearer thought about the relationships between evidence and models in ancient economic history, laying the foundations for a new comparative account of economic structures and growth in the ancient Mediterranean world.
The Greeks : History, Culture, and Society
by Ian B. Morris, Barry B. Powell
Prentice Hall, 2005
Organized chronologically, this book presents a complete picture of Greek civilization as a history. It features sections on the art, architecture, literature, and thought of each period. Names and dates are provided, and cultural achievements and social transformations that accompanied the cascade of historical events are carefully examined. This comprehensive, balanced treatment of ancient Greece covers its history from the prehistoric through the Mycenaean Period, the Dark Ages, the Classical Period, the Hellenistic, and the absorption of Greek culture by Rome. For an understanding of Greek history—its culture and the people—as a whole.
Last updated Oct 7, 2009