Voyager from Xanadu
Author: Morris Rossabi
Publisher:
Published: 2010
Total Pages: 219
ISBN-13:
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Shape Shifters
Author: Lily Anne Y. Welty Tamai
Publisher: U of Nebraska Press
Published: 2020
Total Pages: 444
ISBN-13: 1496217004
DOWNLOAD EBOOKShape Shifters presents a wide-ranging array of essays that examine peoples of mixed racial identity. Moving beyond the static “either/or” categories of racial identification found within typical insular conversations about mixed-race peoples, Shape Shifters explores these mixed-race identities as fluid, ambiguous, contingent, multiple, and malleable. This volume expands our understandings of how individuals and ethnic groups identify themselves within their own sociohistorical contexts. The essays in Shape Shifters explore different historical eras and reach across the globe, from the Roman and Chinese borderlands of classical antiquity to medieval Eurasian shape shifters, the Native peoples of the missions of Spanish California, and racial shape shifting among African Americans in the post–civil rights era. At different times in their lives or over generations in their families, racial shape shifters have moved from one social context to another. And as new social contexts were imposed on them, identities have even changed from one group to another. This is not racial, ethnic, or religious imposture. It is simply the way that people’s lives unfold in fluid sociohistorical circumstances. With contributions by Ryan Abrecht, George J. Sánchez, Laura Moore, and Margaret Hunter, among others, Shape Shifters explores the forces of migration, borderlands, trade, warfare, occupation, colonial imposition, and the creation and dissolution of states and empires to highlight the historically contingent basis of identification among mixed-race peoples across time and space.
Voyager from Xanadu
Author: Morris Rossabi
Publisher: Univ of California Press
Published: 2010-02-10
Total Pages: 248
ISBN-13: 0520262379
DOWNLOAD EBOOKIn Voyager from Xanadu, a distinguished historian tells the little-known story of the life and travels of the first person from China ever to reach Europe. Portraying one of the most remarkable early encounters between East and West, Morris Rossabi also brings to life the intriguing and turbulent era of the Mongol Empire and the last Crusades. Toward the end of the thirteenth century, at about the time Marco Polo arrived in China, a Christian monk, Rabban Sauma, left it, embarking on a journey that would prove more momentous than he could have dreamed. What began as a religious pilgrimage to the Middle East (supported by the Mongol Emperor, Khubilai Khan) ultimately became an extraordinary diplomatic mission. After several years' eventful stay in Persia, Sauma was dispatched to Europe by Persia's Mongol ruler, the Ilkhan. The monk's task: to persuade the Pope and the Kings of France and England to ally with the Ilkhan and launch a Crusade against their common enemy, the Muslim dynasty that controlled the Holy Land. The mission was a striking early instance of geopolitics on a modern scale. Voyager from Xanadu vividly conjures up the places Sauma visited as he crossed two continents, meeting with monarchs and prelates and seeing everything from a battle to a volcanic eruption to countless grisly relics of long-dead saints. It provides a clear and penetrating analysis of the volatile international situation of the era and its impact on Sauma's embassy. And, of course, Voyager from Xanadu traces the life of an exceptional man, from his comfortable youth, through his unique adventures, to his death far from the land of his birth.
The 'book' of Travels
Author: Palmira Johnson Brummett
Publisher: BRILL
Published: 2009
Total Pages: 369
ISBN-13: 9004174982
DOWNLOAD EBOOKThe early modern era is often envisioned as one in which European genres, both narrative and visual, diverged indelibly from those of medieval times. This collection examines a disparate set of travel texts, dating from the thirteenth to the seventeenth centuries, to question that divergence and to assess the modes, themes, and ethnologies of travel writing. It demonstrates the enduring nature of the itinerary, the variant forms of witnessing (including imaginary maps), the crafting of sacred space as a cautionary tale, and the use of the travel narrative to represent the transformation of the authorial self. Focusing on European travelers to the expansive East, from the soft architecture of Timur's tent palaces in Samarqand to the ambiguities of sexual identity at the Mughul court, these essays reveal the possibilities for cultural translation as travelers of varying experience and attitude confront remote and foreign (or not so foreign) space.
Globalism in the Middle Ages and the Early Modern Age
Author: Albrecht Classen
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
Published: 2023-09-05
Total Pages: 628
ISBN-13: 3111190609
DOWNLOAD EBOOKAlthough it is fashionable among modernists to claim that globalism emerged only since ca. 1800, the opposite can well be documented through careful comparative and transdisciplinary studies, as this volume demonstrates, offering a wide range of innovative perspectives on often neglected literary, philosophical, historical, or medical documents. Texts, images, ideas, knowledge, and objects migrated throughout the world already in the pre-modern world, even if the quantitative level compared to the modern world might have been different. In fact, by means of translations and trade, for instance, global connections were established and maintained over the centuries. Archetypal motifs developed in many literatures indicate how much pre-modern people actually shared. But we also discover hard-core facts of global economic exchange, import of exotic medicine, and, on another level, intensive intellectual debates on religious issues. Literary evidence serves best to expose the extent to which contacts with people in foreign countries were imaginable, often desirable, and at times feared, of course. The pre-modern world was much more on the move and reached out to distant lands out of curiosity, economic interests, and political and military concerns. Diplomats crisscrossed the continents, and artists, poets, and craftsmen traveled widely. We can identify, for instance, both the Vikings and the Arabs as global players long before the rise of modern globalism, so this volume promises to rewrite many of our traditional notions about pre-modern worldviews, economic conditions, and the literary sharing on a global level, as perhaps best expressed by the genre of the fable.
Teaching the Silk Road
Author: Jacqueline M. Moore
Publisher: SUNY Press
Published: 2012-02-01
Total Pages: 259
ISBN-13: 1438431031
DOWNLOAD EBOOKAdvocating a global as opposed to a Eurocentric perspective in the college classroom, discusses why and how to teach about Chinas Silk Road. The romance of the Silk Road journey, with its exotic locales and luxury goods, still excites the popular imagination. But study of the trade routes between China and central Asia that flourished from about 200 BCE to the 1500s can also greatly enhance contemporary higher education curricula. Indeed, with people, plants, animals, ideas, and beliefs traversing it, the Silk Road is both a metaphor of globalization and an early example of it. Teaching the Silk Road highlights the reasons to incorporate this material into a variety of courses and shares resources to facilitate that process. It is intended for those who are not Silk Road or Asian specialists but who wish to embrace a global history and civilizations perspective in teaching, as opposed to the more traditional approach that focuses on cultures in isolation. The book explores both classroom and experiential learning and is intentionally interdisciplinary. Each essay focuses on pedagogical strategies or themes that teachers can use to bring the Silk Road into the classroom. Based on years of experience, the authors of Teaching the Silk Road offer sound strategies for both stand-alone courses on aspects of the route and mainstreaming what has been uncovered in three decades of research into existing courses in a variety of disciplines. H-Net Reviews (H-Asia) This collection of essays and personal reflections allows the reader to listen in on a relaxed conversation on teaching the topic of the Silk Road. It offers a nice blueprint for integrating the Silk Road into new or existing curricula. J. Michael Farmer, author of The Talent of Shu: Qiao Zhou and the Intellectual World of Early Medieval Sichuan
To Xanadu
Author: Barbara Crothers Cope
Publisher:
Published: 2005
Total Pages: 122
ISBN-13:
DOWNLOAD EBOOKThe History of Central Asia
Author: Christoph Baumer
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Published: 2016-05-30
Total Pages: 392
ISBN-13: 1838609393
DOWNLOAD EBOOKBetween the ninth and the fifteenth centuries, Central Asia was a major political, economic and cultural hub on the Eurasian continent. In the first half of the thirteenth century it was also the pre-eminent centre of power in the largest land-based empire the world has ever seen. This third volume of Christoph Baumer's extensively praised and lavishly illustrated new history of the region is above all a story of invasion, when tumultuous and often brutal conquest profoundly shaped the later history of the globe. The author explores the rise of Islam and the remarkable victories of the Arab armies which - inspired by their vital, austere and egalitarian desert faith - established important new dynasties like the Seljuks, Karakhanids and Ghaznavids. A golden age of artistic, literary and scientific innovation came to a sudden end when, between 1219 and 1260, Genghiz Khan and his successors overran the Chorasmian-Abbasid lands. Dr Baumer shows that the Mongol conquests, while shattering to their enemies, nevertheless resulted in much greater mercantile and cultural contact between Central Asia and Western Europe.
The Dragon and the Foreign Devils
Author: Harry G. Gelber
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
Published: 2007-05-01
Total Pages: 560
ISBN-13: 0802715915
DOWNLOAD EBOOKExplores the present and future of China from the perspective of its past foreign relations, ranging from the invasions of the steppe horsemen and Mongol conquests to its fluid modern-day dynamic with the East and rapid economic growth.
The Dragon and the Foreign Devils
Author: Harry Gelber
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
Published: 2011-04-05
Total Pages: 588
ISBN-13: 0802719414
DOWNLOAD EBOOKChina is the most exciting rising power in the world today. The fact that China may be the next superpower attracts endless interest from all quarters-yet China is still utterly inscrutable to most outsiders. In The Dragon and the Foreign Devils, Harry Gelber illuminates China's present by looking at the broad sweep of foreign relations in its past. From the incursions by the steppe horsemen and the Mongol conquests to the first arrival of European travelers, foreign fascination with China has followed certain patterns: curiosity, admiration, and greed for trade or territory. But, as China gradually rises from the turbulence in the wake of Mao Zedong to the economic growth and political stability of the twenty-first century, the dynamic between East and West has slowly shifted. Essential reading for anyone interested in China and its evolving relations with foreigners, The Dragon and the Foreign Devils breaks down the walls between East and West and shines a light on the recurring cycles of Chinese history.
