Read and Download eBook Full
Author: Karen Laura Thornber
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Published: 2009
Total Pages: 616
ISBN-13: 9780674036253
DOWNLOAD EBOOKDuring the first half of the 20th century, Japan was the dominant military & political force in East Asia. This study explores the transculturations of Japanese literature amongst the Chinese, Koreans, Taiwanese & Manchurians whose lives had come within the sphere of the Japanese Empire.
Author: David M. Robinson
Publisher: BRILL
Published: 2020-10-26
Total Pages: 458
ISBN-13: 1684170524
DOWNLOAD EBOOKThe rise of the Mongol empire transformed world history. Its collapse in the mid-fourteenth century had equally profound consequences. Four themes dominate this study of the late Mongol empire in Northeast Asia during this chaotic era: the need for a regional perspective encompassing all states and ethnic groups in the area; the process and consequences of pan-Asian integration under the Mongols; the tendency for individual and family interests to trump those of dynasty, country, or linguistic affiliation; and finally, the need to see Koryo Korea as part of the wider Mongol empire. Northeast Asia was an important part of the Mongol empire, and developments there are fundamental to understanding both the nature of the Mongol empire and the new post-empire world emerging in the 1350s and 1360s. In Northeast Asia, Jurchen, Mongol, Chinese, Korean, and Japanese interests intersected, and the collapse of the Great Yuan reshaped Northeast Asia dramatically. To understand this transition, or series of transitions, the author argues, one cannot examine states in isolation. The period witnessed intensified interactions among neighboring polities and new regional levels of economic, political, military, and social integration that explain the importance of personal and family interests and of Korea in the Mongol state.
Author: Karen Thornber
Publisher: University of Michigan Press
Published: 2012-03-02
Total Pages: 751
ISBN-13: 0472028146
DOWNLOAD EBOOKEast Asian literatures are famous for celebrating the beauties of nature and depicting people as intimately connected with the natural world. But in fact, because the region has a long history of transforming and exploiting nature, much of the fiction and poetry in the Chinese, Japanese, and Korean languages portrays people as damaging everything from small woodlands to the entire planet. These texts seldom talk about environmental crises straightforwardly. Instead, like much creative writing on degraded ecosystems, they highlight what Karen Laura Thornber calls ecoambiguity—the complex, contradictory interactions between people and the nonhuman environment. Ecoambiguity is the first book in any language to analyze Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and Taiwanese literary treatments of damaged ecosystems. Thornber closely examines East Asian creative portrayals of inconsistent human attitudes, behaviors, and information concerning the environment and takes up texts by East Asians who have been translated and celebrated around the world, including Gao Xingjian, Ishimure Michiko, Jiang Rong, and Ko Un, as well as fiction and poetry by authors little known even in their homelands. Ecoambiguity addresses such environmental crises as deforesting, damming, pollution, overpopulation, species eradication, climate change, and nuclear apocalypse. This book opens new portals of inquiry in both East Asian literatures and ecocriticism (literature and environment studies), as well as in comparative and world literature.
Author: Deborah R. Coen
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Published: 2018-07-19
Total Pages: 444
ISBN-13: 022655502X
DOWNLOAD EBOOKToday, predicting the impact of human activities on the earth’s climate hinges on tracking interactions among phenomena of radically different dimensions, from the molecular to the planetary. Climate in Motion shows that this multiscalar, multicausal framework emerged well before computers and satellites. Extending the history of modern climate science back into the nineteenth century, Deborah R. Coen uncovers its roots in the politics of empire-building in central and eastern Europe. She argues that essential elements of the modern understanding of climate arose as a means of thinking across scales in a state—the multinational Habsburg Monarchy, a patchwork of medieval kingdoms and modern laws—where such thinking was a political imperative. Led by Julius Hann in Vienna, Habsburg scientists were the first to investigate precisely how local winds and storms might be related to the general circulation of the earth’s atmosphere as a whole. Linking Habsburg climatology to the political and artistic experiments of late imperial Austria, Coen grounds the seemingly esoteric science of the atmosphere in the everyday experiences of an earlier era of globalization. Climate in Motion presents the history of modern climate science as a history of “scaling”—that is, the embodied work of moving between different frameworks for measuring the world. In this way, it offers a critical historical perspective on the concepts of scale that structure thinking about the climate crisis today and the range of possibilities for responding to it.
Author: Thomas R. H. Havens
Publisher: University of Hawaii Press
Published: 2020-06-30
Total Pages: 217
ISBN-13: 082488289X
DOWNLOAD EBOOKLand of Plants in Motion is the first in any language to examine two companion stories: (1) the rise of an East Asian floristic zone and how the Japanese islands evolved an astonishing wealth of plant species, and (2) the growth of Japanese botanical sciences. The majority of plant species regarded as “Japanese” trace their origins to western China and the eastern Himalaya but are so indigenized that they often seem native today. Early modern scientists in Japan drew on knowledge of Chinese herbal medicine but achieved distinctive insights into plant life commensurate with but separate from their European counterparts. Scholars at the University of Tokyo pioneered Japanese plant biology in the late nineteenth century. They incorporated Western botanical methods but sought a degree of difference in taxonomy while also gaining international legitimacy through publications in English. Japan’s age of empire (1895–1945) was less about plant exploration and more about plant collection, for both scientific and economic benefits. Displays of species from throughout the empire made Japan’s sphere of colonization and conquest visible at home. The infrastructure for research and instruction expanded slowly after World War Two: new laboratories, botanical gardens, scholarly societies, and publications eventually allowed for great diversity of specialized study, especially with the growth of molecular biology in the 1970s and DNA research in the 1980s. Basic research was harmed by cuts in government funding during 2012–2017, but Japanese plant biologists continue to enjoy international esteem in many fields of scholarship.
Author: Patrick Radden Keefe
Publisher: Anchor
Published: 2021-04-13
Total Pages: 574
ISBN-13: 038554569X
DOWNLOAD EBOOKNEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK OF THE YEAR • A grand, devastating portrait of three generations of the Sackler family, famed for their philanthropy, whose fortune was built by Valium and whose reputation was destroyed by OxyContin. From the prize-winning and bestselling author of Say Nothing. "A real-life version of the HBO series Succession with a lethal sting in its tail…a masterful work of narrative reportage.” – Laura Miller, Slate The history of the Sackler dynasty is rife with drama—baroque personal lives; bitter disputes over estates; fistfights in boardrooms; glittering art collections; Machiavellian courtroom maneuvers; and the calculated use of money to burnish reputations and crush the less powerful. The Sackler name has adorned the walls of many storied institutions—Harvard, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Oxford, the Louvre. They are one of the richest families in the world, but the source of the family fortune was vague—until it emerged that the Sacklers were responsible for making and marketing a blockbuster painkiller that was the catalyst for the opioid crisis. Empire of Pain is the saga of three generations of a single family and the mark they would leave on the world, a tale that moves from the bustling streets of early twentieth-century Brooklyn to the seaside palaces of Greenwich, Connecticut, and Cap d’Antibes to the corridors of power in Washington, D.C. It follows the family’s early success with Valium to the much more potent OxyContin, marketed with a ruthless technique of co-opting doctors, influencing the FDA, downplaying the drug’s addictiveness. Empire of Pain chronicles the multiple investigations of the Sacklers and their company, and the scorched-earth legal tactics that the family has used to evade accountability. A masterpiece of narrative reporting, Empire of Pain is a ferociously compelling portrait of America’s second Gilded Age, a study of impunity among the super-elite and a relentless investigation of the naked greed that built one of the world’s great fortunes.
Author: Ying Xiong
Publisher: BRILL
Published: 2014-07-14
Total Pages: 403
ISBN-13: 9004274111
DOWNLOAD EBOOKIn Representing Empire Ying Xiong examines Japanese-language colonial literature written by Japanese expatriate writers in Taiwan and Manchuria. Drawing on a wide range of Japanese and Chinese sources, Representing Empire reveals not only a nuanced picture of Japanese literary terrain but also the interplay between imperialism, nationalism, and Pan-Asianism in the colonies. While the existing literature on Japanese nationalism has largely remained within the confines of national history, by using colonial literature as an example, Ying Xiong demonstrates that transnational forces shaped Japanese nationalism in the twentieth century. With its multidisciplinary and comparative approach, Representing Empire adds to a growing body of literature that challenges traditional interpretations of Japanese nationalism and national literary canon. “Representing Empire is an outstanding accomplishment, at once making clearer and complicating our understandings of the literary worlds of Manchuria and Taiwan, and the greater imperial empire within which all were transformed. ... add[s] substantially to the ways in which Japan’s empire and twentieth century East Asian history more generally might be interpreted.” Norman Smith, University of Guelph, Modern Chinese Literature and Culture Resource Center Publication (February, 2015)
Author: Daniela Bleichmar
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Published: 2012-10-08
Total Pages: 299
ISBN-13: 0226058530
DOWNLOAD EBOOKBetween 1777 and 1816, botanical expeditions crisscrossed the vast Spanish empire in an ambitious project to survey the flora of much of the Americas, the Caribbean, and the Philippines. While these voyages produced written texts and compiled collections of specimens, they dedicated an overwhelming proportion of their resources and energy to the creation of visual materials. European and American naturalists and artists collaborated to manufacture a staggering total of more than 12,000 botanical illustrations. Yet these images have remained largely overlooked—until now. In this lavishly illustrated volume, Daniela Bleichmar gives this archive its due, finding in these botanical images a window into the worlds of Enlightenment science, visual culture, and empire. Through innovative interdisciplinary scholarship that bridges the histories of science, visual culture, and the Hispanic world, Bleichmar uses these images to trace two related histories: the little-known history of scientific expeditions in the Hispanic Enlightenment and the history of visual evidence in both science and administration in the early modern Spanish empire. As Bleichmar shows, in the Spanish empire visual epistemology operated not only in scientific contexts but also as part of an imperial apparatus that had a long-established tradition of deploying visual evidence for administrative purposes.
Author: Malgosia Fitzmaurice
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Published: 2020-06-25
Total Pages: 427
ISBN-13: 1108495885
DOWNLOAD EBOOKThe book examines treaty law from the angle of types of motion, combining theory with practical examples and empirical data.
Author: Samuel R. Delany
Publisher: Putnam Publishing Group
Published: 1978
Total Pages: 122
ISBN-13:
DOWNLOAD EBOOK"A powerful device has been hidden in separate pieces. Qrelon, whose planet was destroyed by the empire, leads a small group of rebels that risks everything to collect the pieces of the device that, once complete, will be the weapon powerful enough to destroy the planet-sized computer that runs the empire. Wryn, an archaeology student, is chosen by the empire to assassinate the rebel leader."--Wikipedia
