Throughout most of history, in China the insane were kept within the home and treated by healers who claimed no specialized knowledge of their condition. In the first decade of the twentieth century, however, psychiatric ideas and institutions began to influence longstanding beliefs about the proper treatment for the mentally ill. In The Invention of Madness, Emily Baum traces ...(展开全部)

The Royal Society of London for Improving Natural Knowledge has been at the forefront of scientific endeavour for more than 350 years, since receiving its royal charter from Charles II in 1662. Philosophical Transactions, published in 1665, established the concepts of scientific priority and peer review and is the oldest scientific journal in continuous publication in the world...(展开全部)

Will new information technologies, especially the Internet, bring freedom and democracy to authoritarian China? This study argues that the Internet has brought about new dynamics of socio-political changes in China, and that state power and social forces are transforming in Internet-mediated public space. Its findings are fourfold. First, the Internet empowers both the state an...(展开全部)

What is lost in translation may be a war, a world, a way of life. A unique look into the nineteenth-century clash of empires from both sides of the earthshaking encounter, this book reveals the connections between international law, modern warfare, and comparative grammar--and their influence on the shaping of the modern world in Eastern and Western terms. The Clash of Empires ...(展开全部)

Discussions of China’s early twentieth-century modernization efforts tend to focus almost exclusively on cities, and the changes, both cultural and industrial, seen there. As a result, the communist peasant revolution appears as a decisive historical break. Kate Merkel-Hess corrects that misconception by demonstrating how crucial the countryside was for reformers in China long ...(展开全部)

The Nanputuo Temple in the southeastern Chinese city of Xiamen has been a cherished site for the worship of the bodhisattva Guanyin for centuries. It was a center of modernizing Buddhism in the early twentieth century and a flagship for the revival of Buddhism after state suppression during the Cultural Revolution. The Space of Religion takes readers inside the Nanputuo Temple ...(展开全部)

What are states, and how are they made? Scholars of European history assert that war makes states, just as states make war. This study finds that in China, the challenges of governing produced a trajectory of state-building in which the processes of moral regulation and social control were at least as central to state-making as the exercise of coercive power. State-making is, i...(展开全部)

Casting aside the traditional conception of film as an outgrowth of photography, theater, and the novel, the essays in this volume reassess the relationship between the emergence of film and the broader culture of modernity. Contributors, leading scholars in film and cultural studies, link the popularity of cinema in the late nineteenth century to emerging cultural phenomena su...(展开全部)

Making Religion, Making the State combines cutting-edge perspectives on religion with rich empirical data to offer a challenging new argument about the politics of religion in modern China. The volume goes beyond extant portrayals of the opposition of state and religion to emphasize their mutual constitution. With chapters written by experts on Buddhism, Protestantism, Catholic...(展开全部)

In this meticulously researched study, Sheldon Garon examines the evolution of Japan's governmental policies toward labor from the late nineteenth century to the present day, and he substantially revises prevailing views which depict relations between the Japanese state and labor simply in terms of suppression and mutual antagonism.