In the decades following World War II, municipal leaders and ordinary citizens embraced San Francisco’s identity as the “Gateway to the Pacific,” using it to reimagine and rebuild the city. The city became a cosmopolitan center on account of its newfound celebration of its Japanese and other Asian American residents, its economy linked with Asia, and its favorable location for transpacific partnerships. The most conspicuous testament to San Francisco’s postwar transpacific connections is the Japanese Cultural and Trade Center in the city’s redeveloped Japanese-American enclave. Focusing on the development of the Center, Meredith Oda shows how this multilayered story was embedded within a larger story of the changing institutions and ideas that were shaping the city. During these formative decades, Oda argues, San Francisco’s relations with and ideas about Japan were being forged within the intimate, local sites of civic and community life. This shift took many forms, including changes in city leadership, new municipal institutions, and especially transformations in the built environment. Newly friendly relations between Japan and the United States also meant that Japanese Americans found fresh, if highly constrained, job and community prospects just as the city’s African Americans struggled against rising barriers. San Francisco’s story is an inherently local one, but it also a broader story of a city collectively, if not cooperatively, reimagining its place in a global economy.

In the late nineteenth century, Japan's modernizing quest for empire transformed midwifery into a new woman's profession. With the rise of Japanese immigration to the United States, Japanese midwives (sanba) served as cultural brokers as well as birth attendants for Issei women. They actively participated in the creation of Japanese American community and culture as preservers of Japanese birthing customs and agents of cultural change. Japanese American Midwives reveals the dynamic relationship between this welfare state and the history of women and health. Susan L. Smith blends midwives' individual stories with astute analysis to demonstrate the impossibility of clearly separating domestic policy from foreign policy, public health from racial politics, medical care from women's caregiving, and the history of women and health from national and international politics. By setting the history of Japanese American midwives in this larger context, Smith reveals little-known ethnic, racial, and regional aspects of women's history and the history of medicine.

The world's most feared assassin hones her craft...and her blade. The Silent Assassins of the Red Desert aren't much for conversation, and Celeana Sardothien wouldn't have it any other way. She's not there to chatter, she's there to learn their ways. Quiet suits her just fine-until she begins to suspect there's a traitor in the fortress, and she must determine which of the mute and mysterious assassins is her deadly adversary.

The coveted Heart of Courage jewel—when passed to each sheikh in the House of Kazeem Khan—is said to guarantee love. But Sheikh Zahir rejects this legend. After the bitterness he's suffered, he sees emotion and marriage as two very separate things and orders the jewel be sold! It's down to historian Gina Collins to handle the rare artifact. Returning to the desert plains of Kabuyadir, she is horrified to realize her mysterious new client is the man who gave her one earth-shattering night years ago. Could there be truth in the legend after all…?