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Inside the World of Climate Change Skeptics

By Kristin Haltinner. Dilshani Sarathchandra

As wildfires rip across the western United States and sea levels rise along coastal cities from Louisiana to Alaska, some people nevertheless reject the mainstream scientific consensus on anthropogenic climate change. What leads people to...

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...

Fixing the Image

Ultrasound and the Visuality of Care in Phnom Penh

By Jenna Grant

Introduced in Phnom Penh around 1990, at the twilight of socialism and after two decades of conflict and upheaval, ultrasound took root in humanitarian and then privatized medicine. Services have since multiplied, promising diagnostic information...

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...

Ancient Egypt and Early China

State, Society, and Culture

By Anthony J. Barbieri-Low

Although they existed more than a millennium apart, the great civilizations of New Kingdom Egypt (ca. 1548–1086 BCE) and Han dynasty China (206 BCE–220 CE) shared intriguing similarities. Both were centered around major, flood-prone rivers—the...

Opening Kailasanatha

The Temple in Kanchipuram Revealed in Time and Space

By Padma Kaimal

Stone figures hardened by ascetic discipline and heroic effort face north in deep shadow. There they meet the gazes of the same gods and goddesses but with gentler bodies enacting grace, warmth, seduction, and marriage,...

Making Kantha, Making Home

Women at Work in Colonial Bengal

By Pika Ghosh

In Bengal, mothers swaddle their infants and cover their beds in colorful textiles that are passed down through generations. They create these kantha from layers of soft, recycled fabric strengthened with running stitches and use...

Ancient Ink

The Archaeology of Tattooing

By Lars Krutak, Aaron Deter-Wolf

The human desire to adorn the body is universal and timeless. While specific forms of body decoration and the motivations for them vary by region, culture, and era, all human societies have engaged in practices...

Eulogy for Burying a Crane and the Art of Chinese Calligraphy

By Lei Xue

Eulogy for Burying a Crane (Yi he ming) is perhaps the most eccentric piece in China’s calligraphic canon. Apparently marking the burial of a crane, the large inscription, datable to 514 CE, was once carved...

Bronze and Stone

The Cult of Antiquity in Song Dynasty China

By Yunchiahn C. Sena

Despite China’s long tradition of venerating the past as the ultimate source of cultural authority, the discourse of antiquity prior to the Song period (960–1279) demonstrated little concern for ancient objects. With a focus on...

Classical Seattle

Maestros, Impresarios, Virtuosi, and Other Music Makers

By Melinda Bargreen

The past 50 years have seen a tremendous arts boom in Seattle, which has given the city not only internationally recognized classical music institutions but also great performance halls to showcase their work and that...

A Family History of Illness

Memory as Medicine

By Brett L. Walker

While in the ICU with a near-fatal case of pneumonia, Brett Walker was asked, “Do you have a family history of illness?”—a standard and deceptively simple question that for Walker, a professional historian, took on...

Nikolai's Fortune

By Solveig Torvik

As a child, Solveig Torvik heard stories of a lost, mysterious great-grandfather who left Finland for America to make his fortune - leaving Torvik’s great-grandmother and his unborn daughter behind. As a reporter, Torvik determined...

Women in Pacific Northwest History

By Karen J. Blair

This new edition of Karen Blair’s popular anthology originally published in 1989 includes thirteen essays, eight of which are new. Together they suggest the wide spectrum of women’s experiences that make up a vital part...

Art and Intimacy

How the Arts Began

By Ellen Dissanayake

To Ellen Dissanayake, the arts are biologically evolved propensities of human nature: their fundamental features helped early humans adapt to their environment and reproduce themselves successfully over generations. In Art and Intimacy she argues for...

Faith, Food, and Family in a Yupik Whaling Community

By Carol Zane Jolles and Elinor Mikaghaq Oozeva

For more than fifteen hundred years Yupik and proto-Yupik Eskimo peoples have lived at the site of the Alaskan village of Gambell on St. Lawrence Island. Their history is a record of family and kin,...

Subversive Seduction

Darwin, Sexual Selection, and the Spanish Novel

By Travis Landry

Male-male rivalry and female passive choice, the two principal tenets of Darwinian sexual selection, raise important ethical questions in The Descent of Man--and in the decades since--about the subjugation of women. If female choice is...

Captured in the Middle

Tradition and Experience in Contemporary Native American Writing

By Sidner Larson

Sidner Larson’s Captured in the Middle embodies the very nature of Indian storytelling, which is circular, drawing upon the personal experiences of the narrator at every turn. Larson teaches about contemporary American Indian literature by...

Kirtland Cutter

Architect in the Land of Promise

By Henry C. Matthews

In the early years of the twentieth century, Spokane was singled out for praise in the West for the quality of its architecture and the impressive way it had rebuilt after the devastating fire of...

Landscape Traveled by Coyote and Crane

The World of the Schitsu'umsh

By Rodney Frey and Ernie Stensgar

Anthropologist Rodney Frey culminates a decade of work with the Schitsu’umsh (the Coeur d’Alene Indians of Idaho) in this portrait of the unique bonds between a people and the landscape of their traditional homeland. The...