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Resisting the Nuclear

Art and Activism across the Pacific

By Elyssa Faison, Alison Fields

From uranium mines on the Navajo Nation to craters caused by nuclear testing on the Bikini and Enewetak Atolls, the production and deployment of nuclear weapon technologies have disproportionately harmed Indigenous lands. Sustained exposure to...

Cold War Deceptions

The Asia Foundation and the CIA

By David H. Price

During the early Cold War, the Central Intelligence Agency created dozens of funding fronts to support work that aligned with CIA goals, from clandestine operations and research to liberal anticommunist programs. While investigative journalists and...

Late Industrialization, Tradition, and Social Change in South Korea

By Yong-Chool Ha

South Korea's rapid industrialization occurred with the rise of powerful chaebǒl (family-owned business conglomerates) that controlled vast swaths of the nation's economy. Leader Park Chung Hee's sense of backwardness and urgency led him to rely...

Cops on Campus

Rethinking Safety and Confronting Police Violence

By Yalile Suriel, Grace Watkins, Jude Paul Matias Dizon, John Joseph Sloan III

Over the last five years, headlines have thrust campus police departments from relative obscurity into the national spotlight. Campus constituents have called for campus police, as a tangible manifestation of the War on Crime within...

Capturing Glaciers

A History of Repeat Photography and Global Warming

By Dani Inkpen. Foreword by Paul S. Sutter

Photographs do not simply speak for themselves. Their meanings are built through interpretive frameworks that shift over time. Today, photographs of receding glaciers are one of the most well recognized visualizations of human-caused climate change....

Island X

Taiwanese Student Migrants, Campus Spies, and Cold War Activism

By Wendy Cheng

Island X delves into the compelling political lives of Taiwanese migrants who came to the United States as students from the 1960s through the 1980s. Often depicted as compliant model minorities, many were in fact...

Slapping Leather

Queer Cowfolx at the Gay Rodeo

By Elyssa Ford and Rebecca Scofield

Campy and competitive, gay rodeo offers a community of refuge that straddles the urban and rural. Since the mid-1970s, gay rodeos have provided space to both embrace and challenge the idealized masculinity associated with the...

The Unknown Great

Stories of Japanese Americans at the Margins of History

By Greg Robinson. With Jonathan van Harmelen

Through stories of remarkable people in Japanese American history, The Unknown Great illuminates the diversity of the Nikkei experience from the turn of the twentieth century to the present day. Acclaimed historian and journalist Greg...

The Empire Looks South

Chinese Perceptions of Cambodia before and during the Kingdom of Angkor

By Peter Harris

The most famous firsthand account of the Kingdom of Angkor was left by the imperial Chinese envoy Zhou Daguan. But Zhou's was not the only portrait of Angkor and the kingdoms that came before it....

The Toxic Ship

The Voyage of the Khian Sea and the Global Waste Trade

By Simone M. Müller. Foreword by Paul S. Sutter

In 1986 the Khian Sea, carrying thousands of tons of incinerator ash from Philadelphia, began a two-year journey, roaming the world's oceans in search of a dumping ground. Its initial destination and then country after...

Miscellany of the South Seas

A Chinese Scholar’s Chronicle of Shipwreck and Travel through 1830s Vietnam

By Cai Tinglan. Translated by Kathlene Baldanza and Zhao Lu

In 1835 young Chinese scholar Cai Tinglan was caught in a typhoon while sailing across the Taiwan Strait. He and his shipmates spent a harrowing week at sea before drifting to the coast of central...

Good Formulas

Empirical Evidence in Mid-Imperial Chinese Medical Texts

By Ruth Yun-Ju Chen

Why and how did the strategy of documenting medical practices through personal experience rise to prominence in China? This question is at the heart of Good Formulas, the first book-length study of the use of...

Ecologies of Empire in South Asia, 1400-1900

By Sumit Guha. Foreword by K. Sivaramakrishnan

The perception, valuation, and manipulation of human environments all have their own layered histories. So Sumit Guha argues in this sweeping examination of a pivotal five hundred years when successive empires struggled to harness lands...

An Ecological History of Modern China

By Stevan Harrell

Is environmental degradation an inevitable result of economic development? Can ecosystems be restored once government officials and the public are committed to doing so? These questions are at the heart of An Ecological History of...

Bellwether Histories

Animals, Humans, and US Environments in Crisis

By Susan Nance, Jennifer Marks

A multispecies history of the globalized United States, Bellwether Histories reveals how animals have been ensnared in colonialism, capitalism, and environmental destruction as human decisions created and perpetuated untenable and unequal interspecies relationships. The collection's...

Settler Cannabis

From Gold Rush to Green Rush in Indigenous Northern California

By Kaitlin Reed

Young countercultural back-to-the-land settlers flocked to northwestern California beginning in the 1960s, and by the 1970s, unregulated cannabis production proliferated on Indigenous lands. As of 2021, the California cannabis economy was valued at $3.5 billion....

A Thorough Exploration in Historiography / Shitong

By Liu Zhiji. Translated and Introduced by Victor Cunrui Xiong

In the early eighth century, frustrated with the authorities but still hoping to gain immortality through his future oeuvre, the Tang court historian Liu Zhiji set out to write Shitong, in which he would rigorously...

Insect Histories of East Asia

By David A. Bello, Daniel Burton-Rose

Interactions between people and animals are attracting overdue attention in diverse fields of scholarship, yet insects still creep within the shadows of more charismatic birds, fish, and mammals. Insect Histories of East Asia centers on...

Charged

A History of Batteries and Lessons for a Clean Energy Future

By James Morton Turner. Foreword by Paul S. Sutter

To achieve fossil fuel independence, few technologies are more important than batteries. Used for powering zero-emission vehicles, storing electricity from solar panels and wind turbines, and revitalizing the electric grid, batteries are essential to scaling...

Wide-Open Desert

A Queer History of New Mexico

By Jordan Biro Walters

Throughout the twentieth century, New Mexico’s LGBTQ+ residents inhabited a wide spectrum of spaces, from Santa Fe’s nascent bohemian art scene to the secretive military developments at Los Alamos. Shifting focus away from the urban...