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China Gothic

The Bishop of Beijing and His Cathedral

By Anthony E. Clark. Foreword by Leland M. Roth

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 China’s leading Catholic...

Eulogy for Burying a Crane and the Art of Chinese Calligraphy

By Lei Xue

Eulogy for Burying a Crane (Yi he ming) is perhaps the most eccentric piece in China’s calligraphic canon. Apparently marking the burial of a crane, the large inscription, datable to 514 CE, was once carved...

The Snow Leopard and the Goat

Politics of Conservation in the Western Himalayas

By Shafqat Hussain. Foreword by K. Sivaramakrishnan

Following the downgrading of the snow leopard’s status from “endangered” to “vulnerable” by the International Union for Conservation of Nature in 2017, debate has renewed about the actual number of snow leopards in the wild...

Chinese Funerary Biographies

An Anthology of Remembered Lives

By Patricia Buckley Ebrey, Ping Yao, Cong Ellen Zhang

Tens of thousands of epitaphs, or funerary biographies, survive from imperial China. Engraved on stone and placed in a grave, they typically focus on the deceased’s biography and exemplary words and deeds, expressing the survivors’...

Troubling Borders

An Anthology of Art and Literature by Southeast Asian Women in the Diaspora

By Isabelle Thuy Pelaud, Lan Duong, Mariam B. Lam, Kathy L. Nguyen

Juxtaposing short stories, poetry, painting, and photographs, Troubling Borders showcases the creative work of women of Vietnamese, Cambodian, Lao, Thai, and Filipino ancestry. This thematically arranged collection interrupts borders of categorization and gender, in what...

Fifth Chinese Daughter

By Jade Snow Wong. Introduction by Leslie Bow. Illustrated by Kathryn Uhl

Jade Snow Wong’s autobiography portrays her coming-of-age in San Francisco's Chinatown, offering a rich depiction of her immigrant family and her strict upbringing, as well as her rebellion against family and societal expectations for a...

Where Dragon Veins Meet

The Kangxi Emperor and His Estate at Rehe

By Stephen H. Whiteman

In 1702, the second emperor of the Qing dynasty ordered construction of a new summer palace in Rehe (now Chengde, Hebei) to support his annual tours north among the court’s Inner Mongolian allies. The Mountain...

Axis of Hope

Iranian Women's Rights Activism across Borders

By Catherine Z. Sameh

Political tensions between Iran and the United States in the post-9/11 period and the Global War on Terror have set the stage for Iranian women’s rights activists inside and outside Iran as they seek full...

Quiet Odyssey

A Pioneer Korean Woman in America

By Mary Paik Lee. Edited with an Introduction by Sucheng Chan. Foreword by David K. Yoo

Mary Paik Lee left her native country in 1905, traveling with her parents as a political refugee after Japan imposed control over Korea. Her father worked in the sugar plantations of Hawaii briefly before taking...

Roses from Kenya

Labor, Environment, and the Global Trade in Cut Flowers

By Megan A. Styles. Foreword by K. Sivaramakrishnan

Kenya supplies more than 35 percent of the fresh-cut roses and other flowers sold annually in the European Union. This industry—which employs at least 90,000 workers, most of whom are women—is lucrative but enduringly controversial....

Seattle, Past to Present

By Roger Sale. Introduction by Knute Berger

Roger Sale’s Seattle, Past to Present has become a beloved reflection of Seattle’s history and its possible futures as imagined in 1976, when the book was first published. Drawing on demographic analysis, residential surveys, portraiture,...

Making the Modern Slum

The Power of Capital in Colonial Bombay

By Sheetal Chhabria

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Bombay was beset by crises such as famine and plague. Yet, rather than halting the flow of capital, these crises served to secure it. In colonial Bombay,...

The Whale and the Cupcake

Stories of Subsistence, Longing, and Community in Alaska

By Julia O'Malley. Foreword by Kim Severson

From fish and fiddleheads to salmonberries and Spam, Alaskan cuisine spans the two extremes of locally abundant wild foods and shelf-stable ingredients produced thousands of miles away. As immigration shapes Anchorage into one of the...

Jacob Lawrence

The American Struggle

By Elizabeth Hutton Turner, Austen Barron Bailly

This publication sets the precedent for the next generation of Lawrence scholars and studies in modern and contemporary discourse. The American Struggle explores Jacob Lawrence’s radical way of transforming history into art by looking at...

Pacific

An Ocean of Wonders

By Philip J. Hatfield

If you center a globe on Kiritimati (Christmas Island), all you see around it is a vast expanse of ocean. Islands of various sizes float in view while glimpses of continents encroach on the fringes,...

The Crown and the Capitalists

The Ethnic Chinese and the Founding of the Thai Nation

By Wasana Wongsurawat

Despite competing with much larger imperialist neighbors in Southeast Asia, the Kingdom of Thailand—or Siam, as it was formerly known—has succeeded in transforming itself into a rival modern nation-state over the last two centuries. Recent...

History and Collective Memory in South Asia, 1200–2000

By Sumit Guha

In this far-ranging and erudite exploration of the South Asian past, Sumit Guha discusses the shaping of social and historical memory in world-historical context. He presents memory as the result of both remembering and forgetting...

Poetic Imagination in Japanese Art

Selections from the Collection of Mary and Cheney Cowles

By Maribeth Graybill

Assembled over the last four decades and still growing, the Mary and Cheney Cowles collection of Japanese art is one of the finest in private hands in North America. What began for Cheney Cowles as...

International Impact of Colonial Rule in Korea, 1910-1945

By Yong-Chool Ha

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...

Aiiieeeee!

An Anthology of Asian American Writers

By Frank Chin, Jeffery Paul Chan, Lawson Fusao Inada, Shawn Wong, Tara Fickle

In the eyes of mid-twentieth-century white America, “Aiiieeeee!” was the one-dimensional cry from Asian Americans, their singular expression of all emotions—it signified and perpetuated the idea of Asian Americans as inscrutable, foreign, self-hating, undesirable, and...