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The Power of the Brush

Epistolary Practices in Chosŏn Korea

By Hwisang Cho

Open access edition: DOI 10.6069/9780295747828

The invention of an easily learned Korean alphabet in the mid-fifteenth century sparked an “epistolary revolution” in the following century as letter writing became an indispensable daily practice for elite men...

The Unsung Great

Stories of Extraordinary Japanese Americans

By Greg Robinson

From a title-winning boxer in Louisiana to a Broadway baritone in New York, Japanese Americans have long belied their popular representation as “quiet Americans.” Showcasing the lives and achievements of relatively unknown but remarkable people...

The Zuo Tradition / Zuozhuan Reader

Selections from China’s Earliest Narrative History

By Stephen Durrant, Wai-yee Li, David Schaberg

Zuo Tradition, China’s first great work of history, was completed by about 300 BCE and recounts events during a period of disunity from 722 to 468 BCE. The text, which plays a foundational role in...

The Objectionable Li Zhi

Fiction, Criticism, and Dissent in Late Ming China

By Rivi Handler-Spitz, Pauline C. Lee, Haun Saussy

Iconoclastic scholar Li Zhi (1527–1602) was a central figure in the cultural world of the late Ming dynasty. His provocative and controversial words and actions shaped print culture, literary practice, attitudes toward gender, and perspectives...

Divine, Demonic, and Disordered

Women without Men in Song Dynasty China

By Hsiao-wen Cheng

A variety of Chinese writings from the Song period (960–1279)—medical texts, religious treatises, fiction, and anecdotes—depict women who were considered peculiar because their sexual bodies did not belong to men. These were women who refused...

Bringing Whales Ashore

Oceans and the Environment of Early Modern Japan

By Jakobina K. Arch. Foreword by Paul S. Sutter

Japan today defends its controversial whaling expeditions by invoking tradition—but what was the historical reality? In examining the techniques and impacts of whaling during the Tokugawa period (1603–1868), Jakobina Arch shows that the organized, shore-based...

Cultivating Nature

The Conservation of a Valencian Working Landscape

By Sarah R. Hamilton. Foreword by Paul S. Sutter

Winner of the 2019 Turku Book Award from the European Society for Environmental History

The Albufera Natural Park, an area ten kilometers south of Valencia that is widely regarded as the birthplace of paella, has long...

Oregon

This Storied Land

By William G. Robbins

Oregon’s landscape boasts brilliant waterfalls, towering volcanoes, productive river valleys, and far-reaching high deserts. People have lived in the region for at least twelve thousand years, during which they established communities; named places; harvested fish,...

Alaska

An American Colony

By Stephen W. Haycox

Alaska often looms large as a remote, wild place with endless resources and endlessly independent, resourceful people. Yet it has always been part of larger stories: the movement of Indigenous peoples from Asia into the...

Seeds of Control

Japan’s Empire of Forestry in Colonial Korea

By David Fedman. Foreword by Paul S. Sutter

Japanese colonial rule in Korea (1905–1945) ushered in natural resource management programs that profoundly altered access to and ownership of the peninsula’s extensive mountains and forests. Under the banner of “forest love,” the colonial government...

The Great Quake Debate

The Crusader, the Skeptic, and the Rise of Modern Seismology

By Susan Hough

In the first half of the twentieth century, when seismology was still in in its infancy, renowned geologist Bailey Willis faced off with fellow high-profile scientist Robert T. Hill in a debate with life-or-death consequences...

Fir and Empire

The Transformation of Forests in Early Modern China

By Ian M. Miller. Foreword by Paul S. Sutter

The disappearance of China’s naturally occurring forests is one of the most significant environmental shifts in the country’s history, one often blamed on imperial demand for lumber. China’s early modern forest history is typically viewed...

Communist Pigs

An Animal History of East Germany's Rise and Fall

By Thomas Fleischman. Foreword by Paul S. Sutter

The pig played a fundamental role in the German Democratic Republic’s attempts to create and sustain a modern, industrial food system built on communist principles. By the mid-1980s, East Germany produced more pork per capita...

Unfinished Business

The Fight for Women's Rights

By Polly Russell, Margaretta Jolly

For centuries, women and their allies have fought for women’s rights in all areas of life—bodily autonomy, education, work, culture, science, politics, and history. Their efforts have fundamentally changed the world we live in. And...

Sailor Song

The Shanties and Ballads of the High Seas

By Gerry Smyth. Illustrated by Jonny Hannah

Passed down in the oral tradition and sung as working songs, sea shanties tell the compelling human stories of life on the water: hard labor, battling the elements, pining for distant loves and far-away homes....

Korean Skilled Workers

Toward a Labor Aristocracy

By Hyung-A Kim

South Korea’s triumphant development has catapulted the country’s economy to the eleventh largest in the world. Large family-owned conglomerates, or chaebŏls, such as Samsung, Hyundai, and LG, have become globally preeminent manufacturing brands. Yet Korea’s...

Circulating the Code

Print Media and Legal Knowledge in Qing China

By Ting Zhang

Contrary to longtime assumptions about the insular nature of imperial China’s legal system, Circulating the Code demonstrates that in the Qing dynasty (1644–1911) most legal books were commercially published and available to anyone who could...

The Rise of West Lake

A Cultural Landmark in the Song Dynasty

By Xiaolin Duan

Lovely West Lake, near scenic Hangzhou on China’s east coast, has been celebrated as a major tourist site since the twelfth century. Now as then, visitors boat to its islands, stroll through its gardens, worship...

The Lady of Linshui Pacifies Demons

A Seventeenth-Century Novel

By Kristin Ingrid Fryklund, Mark Edward Lewis, Brigitte Baptandier

The Lady of Linshui—the goddess of women, childbirth, and childhood—is still venerated in south China, Taiwan, and Southeast Asia. Her story evolved from the life of Chen Jinggu in the eighth century and blossomed in...

Gandhi’s Search for the Perfect Diet

Eating with the World in Mind

By Nico Slate

Mahatma Gandhi redefined nutrition as fundamental to building a more just world. What he chose to eat was intimately tied to his beliefs, and his key values of nonviolence, religious tolerance, and rural sustainability developed...