This book shows the effects of globalization on language in social context, identifying the city as the key site for the realization of these effects. It challenges assumptions that hold sustainable linguistic diversity to be inherently non-urban while regarding the city as an unproblematic site for understanding the social function of language.

China, with the world's largest population, numerous ethnic groups and vast geographical space, is also rich in languages. Since 2006, China's State Language Commission has been publishing annual reports on what is called "language life" in China. These reports cover language policy and planning invitatives at the national, provincial and local levels, new trends in language use in a variety of social domains, and major events concerning languages in mainland China, Hong Kong, Macau and Taiwan. Now for the first time, these reports are available in English for anyone interested in Chinese language and linguistics, China's languge, education and social policies, as well as everyday language use among the ordinary people in China. The invaluable data contained in these reports provide an essential reference to researchers, professionals, policy makers, and China watchers.

Winner of the 2017 Virginia Marie Folkins Award, Association of King County Historical Organizations (AKCHO) Winner of the 2017 Hal K. Rothman Book Prize, Western History Association Seattle would not exist without animals. Animals have played a vital role in shaping the city from its founding amid existing indigenous towns in the mid-nineteenth century to the livestock-friendly town of the late nineteenth century to the pet-friendly, livestock-averse modern city. When newcomers first arrived in the 1850s, they hastened to assemble the familiar cohort of cattle, horses, pigs, chickens, and other animals that defined European agriculture. This, in turn, contributed to the dispossession of the Native residents of the area. However, just as various animals were used to create a Euro-American city, the elimination of these same animals from Seattle was key to the creation of the new middle-class neighborhoods of the twentieth century. As dogs and cats came to symbolize home and family, Seattleites’ relationship with livestock became distant and exploitative, demonstrating the deep social contradictions that characterize the modern American metropolis. Throughout Seattle’s history, people have sorted animals into categories and into places as a way of asserting power over animals, other people, and property. In The City Is More Than Human, Frederick Brown explores the dynamic, troubled relationship humans have with animals. In so doing he challenges us to acknowledge the role of animals of all sorts in the making and remaking of cities.

In 1859, the famous German scientist, author of the works “History of the City of Rome in the Middle Ages” and “History of the City of Athens in the Middle Ages” Ferdinand Gregorovius wrote: “Three cities shine in the history of mankind with a splendor of world significance; Jerusalem, Athens and Rome. All three cities in the process of world life are contributing and mutually influencing factors of human culture. Jerusalem, the main city of a small Jewish people, not at all powerful, was the center of that mysterious monotheistic state from which Christianity emerged, and thus it is the metropolis of world religion. Long after its fall, it again receives a world-historical significance, along with Rome and in connection with it. In ancient times, the Romans destroyed Jerusalem, the Jewish people were scattered across the face of the earth, the meaning of the holy city passed to Christian Rome; but in the eleventh century Jerusalem rises again, and in the period of the crusades is the goal of the aspirations of the Christian pilgrims and the subject of the great popular struggle between Europe and Asia. And only then the history of Jerusalem ends with the ideas of which it was a symbol. "