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A CHOICE OUTSTANDING ACADEMIC TITLEThe disappearance of Chinäs naturally occurring forests is one of the most significant environmental shifts in the country¿s history, one often blamed on imperial demand for lumber. Chinäs early modern forest history is typically viewed as a centuries-long process of environmental decline, culminating in a nineteenth-century social and ecological crisis. Pushing back against this narrative of deforestation, Ian Miller charts the rise of timber plantations between about 1000 and 1700, when natural forests were replaced with anthropogenic ones. Miller demonstrates that this form of forest management generally rested on private ownership under relatively distant state oversight and taxation. He further draws on in-depth case studies of shipbuilding and imperial logging to argue that this novel landscape was not created through simple extractive pressures, but by attempts to incorporate institutional and ecological complexity into a unified imperial state.Miller uses the emergence of anthropogenic forests in south China to rethink both temporal and spatial frameworks for Chinese history and the nature of Chinese empire. Because dominant European forestry models do not neatly overlap with the non-Western world, Chinäs history is often left out of global conversations about them; Miller¿s work rectifies this omission and suggests that in some ways, Chinäs forest system may have worked better than the more familiar European institutions.The open access publication of this book was made possible by a grant from the James P. Geiss and Margaret Y. Hsu Foundation.

Clothing and accessories from nineteenth-century China reveal much about women¿s participation in the commercialization of textile handicrafts and the flourishing of urban popular culture. Focusing on women¿s work and fashion, A Fashionable Century presents an array of visually compelling clothing and accessories neglected by traditional histories of Chinese dress, examining these products¿ potential to illuminate issues of gender and identity.In the late Qing, the expansion of production systems and market economies transformed the Chinese fashion system, widening access to fashionable techniques, materials, and imagery. Challenging the conventional production model, in which women embroidered items at home, Silberstein sets fashion within a process of commercialization that created networks of urban guilds, commercial workshops, and subcontracted female workers. These networks gave rise to new trends influenced by performance and prints, and they offered women opportunities to participate in fashion and contribute to local economies and cultures.Rachel Silberstein draws on vernacular and commercial sources, rather than on the official and imperial texts prevalent in Chinese dress history, to demonstrate that in these fascinating objects¿regulated by market desires, rather than imperial edict¿fashion formed at the intersection of commerce and culture.A Fashionable Century is the winner of the Costume Society of America's Millia Davenport Publication Award and was long-listed for the Textile Society of America's R. L. Shep Award. The judges described the book as "an extraordinary achievement in scholarship working with source materials that are little-known outside of China and not otherwise available in English."

In Bengal, mothers swaddle their infants and cover their beds in colorful textiles that are passed down through generations. They create these kantha from layers of soft, recycled fabric strengthened with running stitches and use them as shawls, covers, and seating mats.Making Kantha, Making Home explores the social worlds shaped by the Bengali kantha that survive from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In the first study of colonial-period women¿s embroidery that situates these objects historically and socially, Pika Ghosh brings technique and aesthetic choices into discussion with iconography and regional culture.Ghosh uses ethnographic and archival research, inscriptions, and images to locate embroiderers¿ work within domestic networks and to show how imagery from poetry, drama, prints, and watercolors expresses kantha artists¿ visual literacy. Affinities with older textile practices include the region¿s lucrative maritime trade in embroideries with Europe, Africa, and China. This appraisal of individual objects alongside the people and stories behind the objects¿ creation elevates kantha beyond consideration as mere handcraft to recognition as art.

A CHOICE OUTSTANDING ACADEMIC TITLEOn May 18, 1980, people all over the world watched with awe and horror as Mount St. Helens erupted. Fifty-seven people were killed and hundreds of square miles of what had been lush forests and wild rivers were to all appearances destroyed.Ecologists thought they would have to wait years, or even decades, for life to return to the mountain, but when forest scientist Jerry Franklin helicoptered into the blast area a couple of weeks after the eruption, he found small plants bursting through the ash and animals skittering over the ground. Stunned, he realized he and his colleagues had been thinking of the volcano in completely the wrong way. Rather than being a dead zone, the mountain was very much alive.Mount St. Helens has been surprising ecologists ever since, and in After the Blast Eric Wagner takes readers on a fascinating journey through the blast area and beyond. From fireweed to elk, the plants and animals Franklin saw would not just change how ecologists approached the eruption and its landscape, but also prompt them to think in new ways about how life responds in the face of seemingly total devastation.

One of the most famous rulers in Chinese history, the Yongle emperor (r. 1402¿24) gained renown for constructing Beijing¿s magnificent Forbidden City, directing ambitious naval expeditions, and creating the world¿s largest encyclopedia. What the Emperor Built is the first book-length study devoted to the architectural projects of a single Chinese emperor.Focusing on the imperial palaces in Beijing, a Daoist architectural complex on Mount Wudang, and a Buddhist temple on the Sino-Tibetan frontier, Aurelia Campbell demonstrates how the siting, design, and use of Yongle¿s palaces and temples helped cement his authority and legitimize his usurpation of power. Campbell offers insight into Yongle¿s sense of empire¿from the far-flung locations in which he built, to the distant regions from which he extracted construction materials, and to the use of tens of thousands of craftsmen and other laborers. Through his constructions, Yongle connected himself to the divine, interacted with his subjects, and extended imperial influence across space and time.Spanning issues of architectural design and construction technologies, this deft analysis reveals remarkable advancements in timber-frame construction and implements an art-historical approach to examine patronage, audience, and reception, situating the buildings within their larger historical and religious contexts.

Alaska has not evolved in a vacuum. It has been part of larger stories: the movement of Native peoples and their contact and accommodation to Western culture, the spread of European political economy to the New World, and the expansion of American capitalism and culture.Alaska, an American Colony focuses on Russian America and American Alaska, bringing the story of Alaska up to the present and exploring the continuing impact of Alaska Native claims settlements, the trans-Alaska pipeline, and the Alaska Lands Act. In contrast to the stereotype of Alaska as a place where rugged individualists triumph over the harsh environment, distinguished historian Stephen Haycox offers a less romantic, more complex history that emphasizes the broader national and international contexts of Alaskas past and the similarities between Alaska and the American West. Covering cultural, political, economic, and environmental history, the book also includes an overview of the regions geography and the anthropology of Alaskas Native peoples.Throughout Alaska, an American Colony, Haycox stresses the continuing involvement of Alaska Natives in the states economic, political, and social life and development. He also explores the power of myth in historical representations of Alaska and the controlling influence of national perceptions of the region.

The hugely popular Japanese artist Takehisa Yumeji (1884¿1934) is an emblematic figure of Japan¿s rapidly changing cultural milieu in the early twentieth century. His graphic works include leftist and antiwar illustrations in socialist bulletins, wrenching portrayals of Tokyo after the Great Kant¿ Earthquake of 1923, and fashionable images of beautiful women¿referred to as ¿Yumeji-style beauties¿¿in books and magazines that targeted a new demographic of young female consumers. Yumeji also played a key role in the reinvention of the woodblock medium. As his art and designs proliferated in Japan¿s mass media, Yumeji became a recognizable brand.In the first full-length English-language study of Yumeji¿s work, Nozomi Naoi examines the artist¿s role in shaping modern Japanese identity. Addressing his output from the start of his career in 1905 to the 1920s, when his productivity peaked, Yumeji Modern introduces for the first time in English translation a substantial body of Yumeji¿s texts, including diary entries, poetry, essays, and commentary, alongside his illustrations. Naoi situates Yumeji¿s graphic art within the emerging media landscape from 1900s through the 1910s, when novel forms of reprographic communication helped create new spaces of visual culture and image circulation. Yumeji¿s legacy and his present-day following speak to the broader, ongoing implications of his work with respect to commercial art, visual culture, and print media.

Naomi B. Sokoloff is professor of Hebrew and comparative literature at the University of Washington. She is the author of Imagining the Child in Modern Jewish Fiction and coeditor of Boundaries of Jewish Identity. Nancy E. Berg is professor of Hebrew and comparative literature at Washington University and the author of Exile from Exile: Israeli Writers from Iraq.

Reframes standard accounts of American history based on the simple but radical premise that historical events are shaped by natural circumstances. From the natural philosophy of the founding fathers to environmental forces behind Brown v Board of Education, this book focuses on nature that reveals a perspective on the familiar icons of US history.

This reexamination of the controversial role Emperor Hirohito played during the Pacific War gives particular attention to the question: If the emperor could not stop Japan from going to war with the Allied Powers in 1941, why was he able to play a crucial role in ending the war in 1945? Drawing on previously unavailable primary sources, Noriko Kawamura traces Hirohito's actions from the late 1920s to the end of the war, analyzing the role Hirohito played in Japan's expansion. Emperor Hirohito emerges as a conflicted man who struggled throughout the war to deal with the undefined powers bestowed upon him as a monarch, often juggling the contradictory positions and irreconcilable differences advocated by his subordinates. Kawamura shows that he was by no means a pacifist, but neither did he favor the reckless wars advocated by Japan's military leaders.

Spotlights innovative design,makes use of environmentally friendly technologies, and looks at projects that aim to achieve social as well as aesthetic goals

Includes full-page illustrations of works by more than fifty internationally recognized photographers

Takes a fresh look at Orientalism by shifting its centre from Europe to Ottoman Istanbul and thinking about art in terms of exchange, reciprocity, and comparative imperialisms

In recent years, discussion of the colonial period in Korea has centered mostly on the degree of exploitation or development that took place domestically, while international aspects have been relatively neglected. Colonial discourse, such as characterization of Korea as a ¿hermit nation,¿ was promulgated around the world by Japan and haunts us today. The colonization of Korea also transformed Japan and has had long-term consequences for post¿World War II Northeast Asia as a whole.Through sections that explore Japan¿s images of Korea, colonial Koreans¿ perceptions of foreign societies and foreign relations, and international perceptions of colonial Korea, the essays in this volume show the broad influence of Japanese colonialism not simply on the Korean peninsula, but on how the world understood Japan and how Japan understood itself. When initially incorporated into the Japanese empire, Korea seemed lost to Japan¿s designs, yet Korean resistance to colonial rule, along with later international fear of Japanese expansion, led the world to rethink the importance of Korea as a future sovereign nation.

As China struggled to redefine itself at the turn of the twentieth century, nationalism, religion, and material culture intertwined in revealing ways. This phenomenon is evident in the twin biographies of North Chinäs leading Catholic bishop of the time, Alphonse Favier (1837¿1905), and the Beitang cathedral, epicenter of the Roman Catholic mission in China through incarnations that began in 1701. After its relocation and reconstruction under Favier¿s supervision, the cathedral¿and Favier¿miraculously survived a two-month siege in 1900 during the Boxer Rebellion. Featuring a French Gothic Revival design augmented by Chinese dragon¿shaped gargoyles, marble balustrades in the style of Daoist and Buddhist temples, and other Chinese aesthetic flourishes, Beitang remains an icon of Sino-Western interaction.Anthony Clark draws on archival materials from the Vatican and collections in France, Italy, China, Poland, and the United States to trace the prominent role of French architecture in introducing Western culture and Catholicism to China. A principal device was the aesthetic imagined by the Gothic Revival movement of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the premier example of this in China being the Beitang cathedral. Bishop Favier¿s biography is a lens through which to examine Western missionaries¿ role in colonial endeavors and their complex relationship with the Chinese communities in which they lived and worked.

From Kara Walker¿s hellscape antebellum silhouettes to Paul Beatty¿s bizarre twist on slavery in The Sellout and from Colson Whitehead¿s literal Underground Railroad to Jordan Peele¿s body-snatching Get Out, this volume offers commentary on contemporary artistic works that present, like musical deep cuts, some challenging ¿alternate takes¿ on American slavery. These artists deliberately confront and negotiate the psychic and representational legacies of slavery to imagine possibilities and change. The essays in this volume explore the conceptions of freedom and blackness that undergird these narratives, critically examining how artists growing up in the post¿Civil Rights era have nuanced slavery in a way that is distinctly different from the first wave of neo-slave narratives that emerged from the Civil Rights and Black Power Movements.Slavery and the Post-Black Imagination positions post-blackness as a productive category of analysis that brings into sharp focus recent developments in black cultural productions across various media. These ten essays investigate how millennial black cultural productions trouble long-held notions of blackness by challenging limiting scripts. They interrogate political as well as formal interventions into established discourses to demonstrate how explorations of black identities frequently go hand in hand with the purposeful refiguring of slavery¿s prevailing tropes, narratives, and images.A V Ethel Willis White Book