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Legal Reform in Taiwan under Japanese Colonial Rule, 1895-1945

Tay-sheng Wang

Taiwan�s modern legal system–quite different from those of both traditional China and the People�s Republic–has evolved since the advent of Japanese rule in 1895. Japan has gradually adopted Western law during the 19th-century and when it occupied Taiwan–a frontier society composed of Han Chinese settlers–its codes were instituted for the purpose of rapidly assimilating the Taiwanese people into Japanese society.Tay-sheng Wang�s comprehensive study lays a solid foundation for future analyses of Taiwanese law. It documents how Western traditions influenced the formation of Taiwan�s modern legal structure through the conduit of Japanese colonial rule and demonstrates the extent to which legal concepts diverged from the Chinese legal tradition and moved toward Western law.

Reconciliation Road

John Douglas Marshall

In his prize-winning memoir, Reconciliation Road, John Marshall recounts a road trip around America in search of the truth about his famous grandfather General S. L. A. (Slam) Marshall, author of Pork Chop Hill. In the process he comes to terms with his own past and that of others whose families were torn apart by the Vietnam War.

Stories Old and New

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Stories Old and New is the first complete translation of Feng Menglong�s Gujin xiaoshuo (also known as Yushi mingyan, Illustrious Words to Instruct the World), a collection of 40 short stories first published in 1620 in China. This is considered the best of Feng�s three such collections and was a pivotal work in the development of vernacular fiction. The stories are valuable as examples of early fiction and for their detailed depiction of daily life among a broad range of social classes. The stories are populated by scholars and courtesans, spirits and ghosts, Buddhist monks and nuns, pirates and emperors, and officials both virtuous and corrupt. The streets and abodes of late-Ming China come alive in Shuhui Yang and Yunqin Yang�s smooth and colorful translation of these entertaining tales.Stories Old and New has long been popular in China and has been published there in numerous editions. Although some of the stories have appeared in English translations in journals and anthologies, they have not previously been presented sequentially in thematic pairs as arranged by Feng Menglong. This unabridged translation, illustrated with a selection of woodcuts from the original Ming dynasty edition and including Feng�s interlinear notes and marginal comments, as well as all of the verse woven throughout the text, allows the modern reader to experience the text as did its first audience nearly four centuries ago.For other titles in the collection go to http://www.washington.edu/uwpress/books/ming.html

Vestal Fire

Stephen J. Pyne

Stephen Pyne has been described as having a consciousness «composed of equal parts historian, ecologist, philosopher, critic, poet, and sociologist.» At this time in history when many people are trying to understand their true relationship with the natural environment, this book offers a remarkable contribution–breathtaking in the scope of its research and exhilarating to read.Pyne takes the reader on a journey through time, exploring the terrain of Europe and the uses and abuses of its lands as well as, through migration and conquest, many parts of the rest of the world. Whether he is discussing the Mediterranean region, Russia, Scandinavia, the British Isles, central Europe, or colonized islands; whether he is considering the impact of agriculture, forestry, or Enlightenment thinking, the author brings an unmatched insight to his subject. Vestal Fire takes its title from Vesta, Roman goddess of the hearth and keeper of the sacred fire on Mount Olympus. But the book's title also suggests the strengths and limitations of Europe's peculiar conception of fire, and through fire, of its relationship to nature. Between the untamed fire of the wilderness and the tended fire of the hearth lies a never-ending dialectic in which human beings struggle to control natural forces and processes that in fact can sometimes be directed but never wholly dominated or contained.

A Symbol of Wilderness

Mark W. T. Harvey

Harvey details the first major clash between conservationists and developers after World War II, the successful fight to prevent the building of Echo Park Dam. The dam on the Green River was intended to create a recreational lake in northwest Colorado and generate hydroelectric power, but would have flooded picturesque Echo Park Valley and threatened Dinosaur National Monument, straddling the Utah-Colorado border near Wyoming.

Days of Defeat and Victory

Yegor Gaidar

Yegor Gaidar, the first post-Soviet prime minister of Russia and one of the principal architects of its historic transformation to a market economy, here presents his lively account of governing in the tumultuous early 1990s. Though still in his forties, Gaidar has already played a pivotal role in contemporary Russian political history, championing the cause of dramatic economic reform, aggressive privatization of state enterprises, and painful fiscal discipline in the face of widespread popular resistance.Gaidar�s youthfulness, energy, and daring are symbolic of a new phenomenon in Russian politics – the emergence of a younger generation of politicians with a distinctly technocratic bent, looking firmly to the United States and Europe for inspiration and sharing little of the old generation�s nostalgia for Communist stability. It was largely the implementation of Gaidar�s policies that drove the Russian parliament to rebel against Boris Yeltsin in 1993, leading to the bloody tank assault on the parliament itself. Though Yeltsin prevailed, it was clear that the political and social costs of �shock therapy� were too great for Russia�s fragile democracy to bear, and Gaidar himself was ousted to appease the conservatives. His unfinished agenda was put on hold, though he later returned when Yeltsin needed to placate international financial forces.Gaidar remains active in Russian politics, having formed his own political party, Russia�s Democratic Choice. In this book, he brings his story through Yeltsin�s cliffhanger re-election in 1996, and assesses the still-precarious state of the market reforms and democratic politics.

Landscapes of Promise

William G. Robbins

Landscapes of Promise is the first comprehensive environmental history of the early years of a state that has long been associated with environmental protection. Covering the period from early human habitation to the end of World War II, William Robbins shows that the reality of Oregon's environmental history involves far more than a discussion of timber cutting and land-use planning.Robbins demonstrates that ecological change is not only a creation of modern industrial society. Native Americans altered their environment in a number of ways, including the planned annual burning of grasslands and light-burning of understory forest debris. Early Euro-American settlers who thought they were taming a virgin wilderness were merely imposing a new set of alterations on an already modified landscape.Beginning with the first 18th-century traders on the Pacific Coast, alterations to Oregon's landscape were closely linked to the interests of global market forces. Robbins uses period speeches and publications to document the increasing commodification of the landscape and its products. «Environment melts before the man who is in earnest,» wrote one Oregon booster in 1905, reflecting prevailing ways of thinking.In an impressive synthesis of primary sources and historical analysis, Robbins traces the transformation of the Oregon landscape and the evolution of our attitudes toward the natural world.

Northwest Lands, Northwest Peoples

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It can be said that all of human history is environmental history, for all human action happens in an environment�in a place. This collection of essays explores the environmental history of the Pacific Northwest of North America, addressing questions of how humans have adapted to the northwestern landscape and modified it over time, and how the changing landscape in turn affected human society, economy, laws, and values.Northwest Lands and Peoples includes essays by historians, anthropologists, ecologists, a botanist, geographers, biologists, law professors, and a journalist. It addresses a wide variety of topics indicative of current scholarship in the rapidly growing field of environmental history.

Memory Eternal

Sergei Kan

In Memory Eternal, Sergei Kan combines anthropology and history, anecdote and theory to portray the encounter between the Tlingit Indians and the Russian Orthodox Church in Alaska in the late 1700s and to analyze the indigenous Orthodoxy that developed over the next 200 years. As a native speaker of Russian with eighteen years of fieldwork experience among the Tlingit, Kan is uniquely qualified to relate little-known material from the archives of the Russian church in Alaska to Tlingit oral history and his own observations. By weighing the one body of evidence against the other, he has reevaluated this history, arriving at a persuasive new concept of �converged agendas��the view that the Tlingit and the Russians tended to act in mutually beneficial ways but for entirely different reasons throughout the period of their contact with one another.The Russian-American Company began operations in southeastern Alaska in the 1790s. Against a description of Tlingit culture at the time of the Russians� arrival, Kan examines Russian Orthodox theology, ritual practice, and missionary methods, and the Tlingit response to them. An uneasy symbiosis characterized the early era of the Russian-American Company, when the trading relationship outweighed any spiritual or social rapprochement.A second, major focus of Kan�s study is the Tlingit experience with American colonial domination. He attributes a sudden revival of Tlingit interest in Orthodoxy in the 1880s as their attempt to maintain independence in the face of concerted efforts by the newcomers (and especially Presbyterian missionaries) to Americanize them.Memory Eternal shows the colonial encounter to be both a power struggle and a dialogue between different systems of meaning. It portrays Native Alaskans not as helpless victims but as historical agents who attempted to adjust to the changing reality of their social world without abandoning fundamental principles of their precolonial sociocultural order or their strong sense of self-respect.

Lessons in Being Chinese

Mette Halskov Hansen

Two very different ethnic minority communities—the Naxi of the Lijiang area in northern Yunnan and the Tai (Dai) of Sipsong Panna (Xishuangbanna), along Yunnan’s border with Burma and Laos—are featured in this comparative study of the implementation and reception of state minority education policy in the People’s Republic of China. Based on field research and historical sources, Lessons in Being Chinese argues that state policy, which is intended to be applied uniformly across all minority regions, in fact is much more successful in some than in others.In Lijiang, elite members of the Naxi ethnic group (minzu) have a centuries-old connection with Chinese state educational systems as avenues to social mobility, and have continued this tradition under Communist rule. They participate enthusiastically in the present system, using education to gain official and professional positions. In contrast to the Lijiang area, Sipsong Panna functioned in many ways as a separate kingdom until 1950, with its own script and a separate educational system centered in Theravada Buddhist monasteries. Today, many Tai in that area still prefer monastic education for their sons, and most parents are indifferent to state education.This study finds that standardized, homogenizing state education is in itself incapable of instilling in students an identification with the Chinese state, ironically often increasing ethnic identity. Lessons in Being Chinese enhances our understanding of how state policy toward minorities works in many areas of life, and its conclusions can be extended well beyond the sphere of education. It will be of interest to both anthropologists and educators.