Washington University Press Search Results Page

Waves of Belonging

Indigeneity, Race, and Gender in the Surfing Lineup

By Lydia Heberling, David Kamper, Jess Ponting

Showcases surfing as a site of social belonging and power formation

The surf zone—the place between ocean and shore—offers a powerful space to reflect on the dynamic contemporary politics of our worlds. Surfing always occurs on...

Native Alienation

Spiritual Conquest and the Violence of California Missions

By Charles A. Sepulveda

Challenges the romantic portrayal of Spanish missions

Sites of slavery and spiritual conquest, the California missions played a central role in the brutal subjugation of the region’s Indigenous peoples. Mainstream California history, however, still largely presents...

Three Impeachments

Guo Xiu and the Kangxi Court

By R. Kent Guy

A probe into corruption in late Imperial China

At the beginning of China's long eighteenth century or "High Qing" era, a time of peace and prosperity when the foundations of Manchu rule under the Qing dynasty...

Animating Central Park

A Multispecies History

By Dawn Day Biehler. Foreword by Paul S. Sutter

The entangled human and more-than-human histories of one of the world’s iconic urban green spaces

From deer and beavers to “free range” pigs and goats in and around Seneca Village, what we now know as Central...

Nature Unfurled

Asian American Environmental Histories

By Connie Y. Chiang

Explores Asian Americans' diverse connections and interactions with the natural world

As immigrants and laborers, gardeners and artists, activists and vacationers, Asian Americans have played, worked, and worshipped in nature for almost two centuries, forging enduring...

Refusing Settler Domesticity

Native Women's Labor and Resistance in the Bay Area Outing Program

By Caitlin Keliiaa

Traces young Native women’s lives and experiences as Bay Area domestic workers

In the early twentieth century, the Bay Area Outing Program coercively recruited over a thousand Native girls and women from boarding schools to labor...

Silk Roads

By Sue Brunning, Luk Yu-Ping, Elisabeth R. O'Connell, Tim Williams

Explores how the movement of people, objects, and ideas from 500 to 1000 CE shaped cultures and histories

In the ninth century CE, an Arabian ship sank off the coast of Indonesia. The objects found in...

Transpacific, Undisciplined

By Lily Wong, Christopher B. Patterson, Chien-ting Lin

Remaps the scope and methods of the transpacific approach

Antinuclear coalitions centering Native survivance from Okinawa to the Dakotas to Micronesia, refugee figures and automated empathy in virtual reality, cross-strait erotic intimacy in Taiwanese teahouses, art...

Good Wife, Wise Mother

Educating Han Taiwanese Girls under Japanese Rule

By Fang Yu Hu

Traces Japan's efforts to modernize Taiwan through gendered educational practices

In Good Wife, Wise Mother, female education and citizenship serve as a lens through which to examine Taiwan’s uniqueness as a colonial crossroads between Chinese and...

Alaska Native Resilience

Voices from World War II

By Holly Miowak Guise

Alaska Native elders remember wartime invasion, relocation, and land reclamation

The US government justified its World War II occupation of Alaska as a defense against Japan’s invasion of the Aleutian Islands, but it equally served to...

Cleaning Up the Bomb Factory

Grassroots Activism and Nuclear Waste in the Midwest

By Casey A. Huegel. Foreword by Paul S. Sutter

Housewives, hard hats, and an Ohio town’s restoration of the radioactive wasteland in its backyard

In 1984, a uranium leak at Ohio’s outdated Fernald Feed Materials Production Center highlighted the decades of harm inflicted on Cold...

Botany of Empire

Plant Worlds and the Scientific Legacies of Colonialism

By Banu Subramaniam

An accessible foray into botany’s origins and how we can transform its future

Colonial ambitions spawned imperial attitudes, theories, and practices that remain entrenched within botany and across the life sciences. Banu Subramaniam draws on fields...

Cold War Deceptions

The Asia Foundation and the CIA

By David H. Price

Investigates how the CIA tried to influence scholars and governments

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...

Late Industrialization, Tradition, and Social Change in South Korea

By Yong-Chool Ha

Examines how primary social ties fueled economic growth

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...

Seeds of Control

Japan’s Empire of Forestry in Colonial Korea

By David Fedman. Foreword by Paul S. Sutter

Conservation as a tool of colonialism in early twentieth-century Korea

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....

Fir and Empire

The Transformation of Forests in Early Modern China

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

A CHOICE OUTSTANDING ACADEMIC TITLE

Restores China’s place in forest history

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...

Exiled to Motown

A Community History of Japanese Americans in Detroit

By Detroit JACL History Project Committee

During World War II, Detroit emerged as a relative space of freedom for Nisei permitted by the War Relocation Authority to leave sites of incarceration but banned from returning to their homes in the exclusion...

Cops on Campus

Rethinking Safety and Confronting Police Violence

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

Interrogates the relationship between higher education and the carceral state

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...

Treaty Justice

The Northwest Tribes, the Boldt Decision, and the Recognition of Fishing Rights

By Charles Wilkinson

In 1974, Judge George Boldt issued a ruling that affirmed the fishing rights and tribal sovereignty of Native nations in Washington State. The Boldt Decision transformed Indigenous law and resource management across the United States...

Resisting the Nuclear

Art and Activism across the Pacific

By Elyssa Faison, Alison Fields

A transpacific tour of nuclear humanities

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...