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Slapping Leather

Queer Cowfolx at the Gay Rodeo

By Elyssa Ford and Rebecca Scofield

Hacking the Underground

Disability, Infrastructure, and London's Public Transport System

By Raquel Velho

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...

Biking Uphill in the Rain

The Story of Seattle from behind the Handlebars

By Tom Fucoloro

Seattle was recently named the best bike city in the United States by Bicycling magazine. How did this notoriously hilly and rainy city become so inviting to bicyclists? And what challenges lie ahead for Puget...

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...

Modified Bodies, Material Selves

Beauty Ideals in Post-Reform Shanghai

By Julie E. Starr

Thin body, white skin, and big eyes. Such beauty ideals are ubiquitous across Shanghai, where salons and weight-loss clinics offering an array of products and treatment options beckon city dwellers with promises of a "better...

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...

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...

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....

Stomp and Shout

R&B and the Origins of Northwest Rock and Roll

By Peter Blecha

Long before the world discovered grunge, the Pacific Northwest was already home to a singular music culture. In the late 1950s, locals had codified a distinct offshoot of rockin' R&B, and a surprising number of...

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...

Skid Road

On the Frontier of Health and Homelessness in Seattle

By Josephine Ensign

Affluent Seattle has one of the highest numbers of unhoused people in the United States. In 2021 an estimated 40,800 people experienced homelessness in Seattle and King County during the year, not counting the significant...

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...

Seattle from the Margins

Exclusion, Erasure, and the Making of a Pacific Coast City

By Megan Asaka

From the origins of the city in the mid-nineteenth century to the beginning of World War II, Seattle's urban workforce consisted overwhelmingly of migrant laborers who powered the seasonal, extractive economy of the Pacific Northwest....

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...