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Chinese Autobiographical Writing

An Anthology of Personal Accounts

By Patricia Buckley Ebrey, Cong Ellen Zhang, Ping Yao

Personal accounts help us understand notions of self, interpersonal relations, and historical events. Chinese Autobiographical Writing contains full translations of works by fifty individuals that illuminate the history and conventions of writing about oneself in...

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...

The Camphor Tree and the Elephant

Religion and Ecological Change in Maritime Southeast Asia

By Faizah Zakaria. Foreword by K. Sivaramakrishnan

What is the role of religion in shaping interactions and relations between the human and nonhuman in nature? Why are Muslim and Christian organizations generally not a potent force in Southeast Asian environmental movements? The...

The Cultivated Forest

People and Woodlands in Asian History

By Ian M. Miller, Bradley Camp Davis, Brian Lander, John S. Lee

Forests have histories that need to be told. This examination of wood and woodlands in East and Southeast Asia brings together case studies from China, Japan, Korea, Taiwan, and Sumatra to explore continuities in the...

People of the Ecotone

Environment and Indigenous Power at the Center of Early America

By Robert Michael Morrissey. Foreword by Paul S. Sutter

In People of the Ecotone, Robert Morrissey weaves together a history of Native peoples with a history of an ecotone to tell a new story about the roots of the Fox Wars, among the most...

Black Lives in Alaska

A History of African Americans in the Far Northwest

By Ian C. Hartman and David Reamer. Foreword by Calvin E. Williams

The history of Black Alaskans runs deep and spans generations. Decades before statehood and earlier even than the Klondike gold rush of the 1890s, Black men and women participated in Alaska’s politics and culture. They...

Botticelli and Renaissance Florence

Masterworks from the Uffizi

By Cecilia Frosinini, Rachel Mcgarry

This sumptuously illustrated book presents the most recent scholarship in English on Botticelli and Renaissance Florence, featuring essays and entries written by an international team of scholars and experts in the field.
The authors examine both...

New Women of Empire

Gendered Politics and Racial Uplift in Interwar Japanese America

By Chrissy Yee Lau

Strong, bold, and vivacious—Japanese American young women were leaders and heroines of the Roaring Twenties. Controversial to the male immigrant elite for their rebellion against gender norms, these women made indelible changes in the community,...

The Many Lives of the First Emperor of China

By Anthony J. Barbieri-Low

Ying Zheng, founder of the Qin empire, is recognized as a pivotal figure in world history, alongside other notable conquerors such as Alexander the Great, Genghis Khan, and Julius Caesar. His accomplishments include conquest of...

Charged

A History of Batteries and Lessons for a Clean Energy Future

By James Morton Turner. Foreword by Paul S. Sutter

For a clean energy future, 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...

The Tibetan Nun Mingyur Peldrön

A Woman of Power and Privilege

By Alison Melnick Dyer

Born to a powerful family and educated at the prominent Mindröling Monastery, the Tibetan Buddhist nun and teacher Mingyur Peldrön (1699–1769) leveraged her privileged status and overcame significant adversity, including exile during a civil war,...

Labor under Siege

Big Bob McEllrath and the ILWU’s Fight for Organized Labor in an Anti-Union Era

By Harvey Schwartz with Ronald E. Magden

At six feet four inches and with a powerful speaking style, Big Bob—Robert McEllrath's waterfront handle—was heralded for his charisma, unifying vision, and negotiating prowess. President of the International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU) for...

The Forging of a Black Community

Seattle’s Central District from 1870 through the Civil Rights Era

By Quintard Taylor. Forewords by Quin'Nita Cobbins-Modica and Norman Rice. Afterword by Albert S. Broussard

Seattle's first black resident was a sailor named Manuel Lopes who arrived in 1858 and became the small community's first barber. He left in the early 1870s to seek economic prosperity elsewhere, but as Seattle...

Pioneering Death

The Violence of Boyhood in Turn-of-the-Century Oregon

By Peter Boag

On an autumn day in 1895, eighteen-year-old Loyd Montgomery shot his parents and a neighbor in a gruesome act that reverberated beyond the small confines of Montgomery's Oregon farming community. The dispassionate slaying and Montgomery's...

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 key role in the German Democratic Republic's attempts to create a modern, industrial food system built on communist principles. By the mid-1980s, East Germany produced more pork per capita than West...

Three Early Mahāyāna Treatises from Gandhāra

Bajaur Kharoṣṭhī Fragments 4, 6, and 11

By Andrea Schlosser

The Gandhāran birch-bark scrolls preserve the earliest remains of Buddhist literature known today and provide unprecedented insights into the history of Buddhism. This volume presents three manuscripts from the Bajaur Collection (BC), a group of...

Debating Malthus

A Documentary Reader on Population, Resources, and the Environment

By Robert J. Mayhew, Paul S. Sutter

For centuries, thinking about the earth's increasing human population has been tied to environmental ideas and political action. This highly teachable collection of contextualized primary sources allows students to follow European and North American discussions...

A Ming Confucian’s World

Selections from Miscellaneous Records from the Bean Garden

By Lu Rong. Translated and introduced by Mark Halperin

A forgotten century marks the years between the Ming dynasty's (1368–1644) turbulent founding and its sixteenth-century age of exploration and economic transformation. In this period of social stability, retired scholar-official Lu Rong chronicled his observations...

Temples in the Cliffside

Buddhist Art in Sichuan

By Sonya S. Lee

At sixty-two meters the Leshan Buddha in southwest China is the world’s tallest premodern statue. Carved out of a riverside cliff in the eighth century, it has evolved from a religious center to a UNESCO...