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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...

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...

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...

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...

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,...

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....

Peace Corps Volunteers and the Making of Korean Studies in the United States

By Seung-kyung Kim, Michael Robinson

From 1966 through 1981 the Peace Corps sent more than two thousand volunteers to South Korea, to teach English and provide healthcare. A small yet significant number of them returned to the United States and...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

The Organic Profit

Rodale and the Making of Marketplace Environmentalism

By Andrew N. Case. Foreword by Paul S. Sutter

Where did the curious idea of buying one’s way to sustainability come from? In no small part, the answer lies in the story of entrepreneurial health reformer J. I. Rodale, his son Robert Rodale, and...

Taiwan in Dynamic Transition

Nation Building and Democratization

By Ryan Dunch, Ashley Esarey, Thomas B. Gold

Following a remarkable transition from authoritarian rule to robust democracy, Taiwan has grown into a prosperous but widely unrecognized nation-state for which no uncontested sovereign space exists. Increasingly vigorous assertions of Taiwanese identity expose the...

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...

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 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...