Based upon extensive archival research and bringing to life the words and actions of extraordinary individuals from the early 20th century, this book calls into question contemporary assumptions about the appreciation of diversity as a solely postcolonial phenomenon. It shows how Bahá’í, Muslim, and Jewish leaders prior to and during WWI found value in the existence of many different religions, races, languages, nations, and ethnicities within the British Empire. Recognition of this heterogeneity combined with sympathy for certain liberal traditions allowed those historical actors to engage with that imperial state and culture in ways that would have an impact on future generations and relevance to modern debates.
Annotation World History: Cultures, States, and Societies to 1500 offers a comprehensive introduction to the history of humankind from prehistory to 1500. Authored by six USG faculty members with advance degrees in History, this textbook offers up-to-date original scholarship. It covers such cultures, states, and societies as Ancient Mesopotamia, Ancient Israel, Dynastic Egypt, India's Classical Age, the Dynasties of China, Archaic Greece, the Roman Empire, Islam, Medieval Africa, the Americas, and the Khanates of Central Asia. It includes 350 high-quality images and maps, chronologies, and learning questions to help guide student learning. Its digital nature allows students to follow links to applicable sources and videos, expanding their educational experience beyond the textbook. It provides a new and free alternative to traditional textbooks, making World History an invaluable resource in our modern age of technology and advancement.
This book evaluates a hundred years of scholarship on how empire transformed the Roman world, and advances a new theory of how the empire worked and was experienced. It engages extensively with Rome's Republican empire as well as the 'Empire of the Caesars', examines a broad range of ancient evidence (material, documentary, and literary) that illuminates multiple perspectives, and emphasizes the much longer history of imperial rule within which the Roman Empire emerged. Steering a course between overemphasis on resistance and overemphasis on consensus, it highlights the political, social, religious and cultural consequences of an imperial system within which functions of state were substantially delegated to, or more often simply assumed by, local agencies and institutions. The book is accessible and of value to a wide range of undergraduate and graduate students as well as of interest to all scholars concerned with the rise and fall of the Roman Empire.
Focusing on the Ming and Qing eras, this book analyses crucial moments in the formation of cultural, regional and religious identities. It demonstrates how the imperial discourse is many-faceted, rather than a monolithic agent of cultural assimilation.
When the United States took control of the Philippines and Puerto Rico in the wake of the Spanish-American War, it declared that it would transform its new colonies through lessons in self-government and the ways of American-style democracy. In both territories, U.S. colonial officials built extensive public school systems, and they set up American-style elections and governmental institutions. The officials aimed their lessons in democratic government at the political elite: the relatively small class of the wealthy, educated, and politically powerful within each colony. While they retained ultimate control for themselves, the Americans let the elite vote, hold local office, and formulate legislation in national assemblies. American Empire and the Politics of Meaning is an examination of how these efforts to provide the elite of Puerto Rico and the Philippines a practical education in self-government played out on the ground in the early years of American colonial rule, from 1898 until 1912. It is the first systematic comparative analysis of these early exercises in American imperial power. The sociologist Julian Go unravels how American authorities used “culture” as both a tool and a target of rule, and how the Puerto Rican and Philippine elite received, creatively engaged, and sometimes silently subverted the Americans’ ostensibly benign intentions. Rather than finding that the attempt to transplant American-style democracy led to incommensurable “culture clashes,” Go assesses complex processes of cultural accommodation and transformation. By combining rich historical detail with broader theories of meaning, culture, and colonialism, he provides an innovative study of the hidden intersections of political power and cultural meaning-making in America’s earliest overseas empire.
In Metaphysics of Goodness, Robert Cummings Neville extends Alfred North Whitehead's project of cultural studies, which was based on a new metaphysics that Whitehead developed in Adventures of Ideas. Neville's focus is value or goodness in many modes. The metaphysics treated in this book derive from the Platonic and Confucian traditions, with significant modifications of Whitehead, Peirce, Dewey, Confucius, Xunzi, and Zhou Dunyi. Part one develops a theory of form based on a metaphysics of harmony. Part two elaborates a theory of art based on a metaphysics of beauty. Part three sketches a theory of personhood based on a metaphysics of obligation. Part four discusses civilization in a systematic way based on a metaphysics of flourishing. Throughout the book, Neville elaborates a theory of interpretation that is inspired by Peirce, Dewey, and Xunzi but is not limited to their ideas. While the reasoning of the book is concise, it employs methodologies from many kinds of philosophy, art criticism, ethics, and cultural studies, and sees philosophy as needing to learn from all these disciplines.
The eleven essays in this collection address various aspects of cross-cultural studies. Contributors were visiting scholars at the Center for Cultural Research at Aarhus University in Denmark. The clarity provided by their reflections concerning both the rewards and limitations of cross-cultural studies will be increasingly important now that we've entered the pluralistic world of the new millennium.
Six complete cross-curricular lesson plans for embracing cultural diversity - specific regions within the continents of North America, Africa, Europe, Asia, and Australia are included. Discover history, landmarks, traditions, and much more in this activity-packed, reproducible resource.
The gospel is directed to people in the concreteness of their lives. For this reason the understanding of the gospel is always of a contextual nature, i.e., is at all times related to the situations in which people live and is therefore influenced by various cultures. The one gospel is understood in and shaped by many cultures. In One Gospel—Many Cultures authors from various parts of the world describe examples of such contextual understandings of the gospel message. The volume contains accounts of Jesus as rice in a Korean and as guru in a South-Indian setting; churches in secular and individualistic societies on both sides of the Atlantic struggling to understand the gospel anew; Christians in East Asian megalopolises trying to inculturate faith in their local cultures; poverty stricken people in massive urban areas in Latin America who cannot read eating fragments of the Psalms; women in African countries suffering poverty and threatened by the spread of diseases, raising the question whether the churches should stick to monogamy or make room for polygamy? These examples entail serious questions for the churches. In what does the unity of the worldwide church consist and how strong is its witness if various contexts yield different interpretations of the gospel? Is cross-cultural understanding in the church possible? Is the World's Day of Women's Prayer perhaps a better example of cross-cultural sharing and unity, women listening to women from parts of the world other than their own, praying together, sharing songs and, if needed, money, and thereby demonstrating one faith, one gospel, one God. And to take another completely different case, was apartheid not a cruel form of contextualization, a parody of the gospel of liberation, a negation of the gospel that calls for and makes possible the breaking down of existing walls of separation between people of different races, colours, nations and genders? The contributors to the work in hand do not merely present case studies of attempts to bring the gospel into rapport with diverse cultural and human situations but also discuss the pro's and con's of the examples of contextualization they describe. The papers included in the present work are the fruit of a study project which forms part of the larger long-standing and ongoing program of theological reflection undertaken by the World Alliance of Reformed Churches. With its fascinating cases studies and thorough discussions of the problems and issues involved in contextualization, this volume will be recognized as an important textbook for academic courses in intercultural theology, ecumenical studies and theological hermeneutics. Contributors: Marcella Althaus-Reid, Russell Botman, Heup Young Kim, Christine Lienemann-Perrin, Mercy Amba Oduyoye, Joseph Small, M. Thomas Thangaraj, Hendrik M. Vroom, and Choo-Lak Yeow
