Graduate students have traditionally learned a good part of what they know about sources and research aids on modern China through hearsay and serendipity, in unsystematic and unreliable bits and pieces. The field has now developed to the point where this need not and ought not to be so. It is now possible for beginning researchers to start with some shared basic knowledge of research aids and …
In the latter half of the fourteenth century, at one end of the Eurasian continent, the stage was not yet set for the emergence of modern nation-states. At the other end, the Chinese drove out their Mongol overlords, inaugurated a new native dynasty called Ming (1368–1644), and reasserted the mastery of their national destiny. It was a dramatic era of change, the full significance of which ca…
"Replacing tyranny with justice, healing deep scars, exchanging hatred for hope . . . the women in This Was Not Our War teach us how."—William Jefferson Clinton This Was Not Our War shares amazing first-person accounts of twenty-six Bosnian women who are reconstructing their society following years of devastating warfare. A university student working to resettle refugees, a paramedic who foun…
In Ontological Terror Calvin L. Warren intervenes in Afro-pessimism, Heideggerian metaphysics, and black humanist philosophy by positing that the "Negro question" is intimately imbricated with questions of Being. Warren uses the figure of the antebellum free black as a philosophical paradigm for thinking through the tensions between blackness and Being. He illustrates how blacks embody a metaph…
In Media Primitivism Delinda Collier provides a sweeping new understanding of technological media in African art, rethinking the assumptions that have conceptualized African art as unmediated, primary, and natural. Collier responds to these preoccupations by exploring African artworks that challenge these narratives. From one of the first works of electronic music, Halim El-Dabh’s Ta’abir A…
In Claiming Union Widowhood, Brandi Clay Brimmer analyzes the US pension system from the perspective of poor black women during and after the Civil War. Reconstructing the grassroots pension network in New Bern, North Carolina, through a broad range of historical sources, she outlines how the mothers, wives, and widows of black Union soldiers struggled to claim pensions in the face of evidentia…
The Mertiyo Rathors of Merto, Rajasthan is a treasure for scholars of Rajput history. Richard D. Saran and Norman P. Ziegler, whose contributions to Rajput studies are well known to specialists in the field, have given us a work of deep and exacting scholarship. It is the culmination of decades devoted to the study of Middle Marwari chronicles from Rajasthan. The sources translated here provide…
The Media Welfare State: Nordic Media in the Digital Era comprehensively addresses the central dynamics of the digitalization of the media industry in the Nordic countries—Sweden, Norway, Denmark, Finland, and Iceland—and the ways media organizations there are transforming to address the new digital environment. Taking a comparative approach, the authors provide an overview of media institu…
In Media, Technology, and Society , some of the most prominent figures in media studies explore the issue of media evolution. Focusing on a variety of compelling examples in media history, ranging from the telephone to the television, the radio to the Internet, these essays collectively address a series of notoriously vexing questions about the nature of technological change. Is it possible to …
Pentasyllabic poetry has been a focus of critical study since the appearance of the earliest works of Chinese literary criticism in the Six Dynasties period. Throughout the subsequent dynasties, traditional Chinese critics continued to examine pentasyllabic poetry as a leading poetic type and to compile various comprehensive anthologies of it.The Matrix of Lyric Transformation enriches this tra…