An illustrated version of a song celebrating the brotherhood of humanity and the possibility of world peace.

(Fifteen pages of photos)The world is thirty minutes away from total nuclear annihilation.The year is 1986. The United States and the Soviet Union face-off in dangerous and escalating game of Mutual Assured Destruction. Fifty thousand nuclear weapons are targeted and ready for war. Armaggedon is just the push of a button away.In an effort to prevent global nuclear disaster, over 1,200 people begin walking from Los Angeles to Washington, D.C. on the Great Peace March-- a 3,235 mile, eight-and-a-half month long trek for nuclear disarmament. Stranded in the desert by the financial collapse of their sponsoring organization, about 500 Marchers join together to form a community of peace and love. They re-organize and continue the March, demanding an end to the madness of nuclear weapons and offering a message of hope to a troubled world.Carrying a black-and-white Peace Flag and wearing a day-glo Peace Helmet, one Marcher, Born Again Hippie, finds himself not only on a walk for global peace, but also on a path of spiritual discovery, commitment, and realization. He vows to walk every step of the way on the Great Peace March, his effort becoming both a poltical statement and a passionate prayer.This is the story of an epic and inspiring journey of Peace Marchers in a world on the brink of nuclear war, as seen through the eyes-- and felt in the Heart-- of Born Again Hippie.

An illustrated version of a song celebrating the brotherhood of humanity and the possibility of world peace.

The closing years of the Cold War and the Reagan administration form the backdrop of Lee Anderson's The Prince of Peace City, a historical novel about self-discovery and peace activism. Nuclear weapons strategist Corey Watson decides to join the Great Peace March for Global Nuclear Disarmament as a break from his demanding job. When harsh weather, financial woes, and the collapse of the sponsoring organization, Los Angeles-based PRO-Peace, threaten the march, Corey and others reinvent it as a grassroots enterprise. Corey's dual identity solidifies as the march moves east through the deserts of the American west. He meets a Nobel Prize-winning nuclear physicist turned peace activist. Corey also helps form a splinter group called the Utah Spirit Walk. The war gamer is called upon to mediate conflicts on the Spirit Walk, an experience that starts to change his views on international cooperation and arms control. Corey's ongoing work as a defense analyst attracts critics and controversy. He overcomes this opposition and gradually becomes a voice for nuclear disarmament. Anderson's novel is a 30th anniversary tribute to the Great Peace March. He was a proud participant in the original event.

Performing the Great Peace offers a cultural approach to understanding the politics of the Tokugawa period, at the same time deconstructing some of the assumptions of modern national historiographies. Deploying the political terms uchi (inside), omote (ritual interface), and naisho (informal negotiation)—all commonly used in the Tokugawa period—Luke Roberts explores how daimyo and the Tokugawa government understood political relations and managed politics in terms of spatial autonomy, ritual submission, and informal negotiation. Roberts suggests as well that a layered hierarchy of omote and uchi relations strongly influenced politics down to the village and household level, a method that clarifies many seeming anomalies in the Tokugawa order. He analyzes in one chapter how the identities of daimyo and domains differed according to whether they were facing the Tokugawa or speaking to members of the domain and daimyo household: For example, a large domain might be identified as a“country” by insiders and as a “private territory” in external discourse. In another chapter he investigates the common occurrence of daimyo who remained formally alive to the government months or even years after they had died in order that inheritance issues could be managed peacefully within their households. The operation of the court system in boundary disputes is analyzed as are the “illegal” enshrinements of daimyo inside domains that were sometimes used to construct forms of domain-state Shinto. Performing the Great Peace’s convincing analyses and insightful conceptual framework will benefit historians of not only the Tokugawa and Meiji periods, but Japan in general and others seeking innovative approaches to premodern history.

This first Western-language translation of one of the great books of the Daoist religious tradition, the Taiping jing, or “Scripture on Great Peace,” documents early Chinese medieval thought and lays the groundwork for a more complete understanding of Daoism’s origins. Barbara Hendrischke, a leading expert on the Taiping jing in the West, has spent twenty-five years on this magisterial translation, which includes notes that contextualize the scripture’s political and religious significance. Virtually unknown to scholars until the 1970s, the Taiping jing raises the hope for salvation in a practical manner by instructing men and women how to appease heaven and satisfy earth and thereby reverse the fate that thousands of years of human wrongdoing has brought about. The scripture stems from the beginnings of the Daoist religious movement, when ideas contained in the ancient Laozi were spread with missionary fervor among the population at large. The Taiping jing demonstrates how early Chinese medieval thought arose from the breakdown of the old imperial order and replaced it with a vision of a new, more diverse and fair society that would integrate outsiders—in particular women and people of a non-Chinese background.