Charles Lang Freer (1856-1919) was a shrewd businessman, world traveler, self-taught aesthete, and a highly disciplined collector whose enduring legacy was the museum on the National Mall that bears his name: the Freer Gallery of Art, the first art museum of the Smithsonian. This richly illustrated narrative tells the story of Freer's humble beginnings in Kingston, New York, his rise to prominence in the railroad manufacturing industry in Detroit, and his transformation from capitalist to connoisseur of both Asian and American art. Other sections of the book explore Freer's friendships with artists, the decorative transformation of his home in Detroit, and his quest for masterpieces from Turkey to Tokyo. Drawing on Freer's voluminous correspondence and personal papers, the book frames Freer's biography against the background of Gilded Age culture and the rise of America as an international power in the early decades of the twentieth century.

The six biblical manuscripts that reside in the Freer Gallery of Art in Washington DC are historically significant artifacts for tracing the early history of the transmission of the writings that make up the New Testament and the Septuagint. The manuscripts, all purchased in Egypt at the beginning of the twentieth century by Charles Freer, date to the third through fifth centuries and include codices of the four Gospels, Deuteronomy and Joshua, the Psalms, and the Pauline Epistles, as well as a Coptic codex of the Psalms and a papyrus codex of the Minor Prophets, which, until the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls, was the earliest Greek manuscript of the Minor Prophets known. The ten essays in this volume are a notable collection of fresh scholarship with long-term value for the study of what is a small but highly valuable treasure trove of biblical manuscripts. The contributors are Malcolm Choat, Kent D. Clarke, Kristin De Troyer, Timothy J. Finney, Dennis Haugh, Larry W. Hurtado, J. Bruce Prior, Jean-Francois Racine, James R. Royse, Ulrich Schmid, and Thomas A. Wayment. Book jacket.

Paths to Power includes essays on US foreign relations from the founding of the nation though the outbreak of World War II. Essays by leading historians review the literature on American diplomacy in the early Republic and in the age of Manifest Destiny, on American imperialism in the late nineteenth century and in the age of Roosevelt and Taft, on war and peace in the Wilsonian era, on foreign policy in the Republican ascendancy of the 1920s, and on the origins of World War II in Europe and the Pacific. The result is a comprehensive assessment of the current literature, helpful suggestions for further research, and a useful primer for students and scholars of American foreign relations.

Kitsch: the mere word evokes mental images of cutesy collectibles, treacly trinkets, sweetly sentimental scenes, thematically trite tabletop tchotchkes, or perhaps anemic appropriations of canonical works of art. Frequently dismissed as facile, lowbrow, or one-off, throwaway aesthetics, kitsch elicits responses that range from the sardonic smirk laced with derision to the grin glimmering with the indulgence in a “guilty” pleasure. Kitsch, however, is surprisingly mobile and complex, as evidenced by its recent renewal as “kitschy cool.” This ambiguity not only allows it to gesture towards a disparate array of artifacts and ideations, but also to be pushed and pulled in various applicatory directions. The contributors to this collection address the problem of how and what kitsch might signify, and approach the kitsch question as a complex, nuanced interrogative. They consider kitsch in relation to its historical association with pseudo-art, its theoretical underpinnings and connections to class, the deliberate mobilization of kitsch in the work of specific artists, kitsch as a form of practice, as well as kitsch’s traffic with race, patriotism, and postmodernism. The essays in this collection necessarily cut a wide interpretative path, mapping the terrain of the phenomenon of kitsch – historically, conceptually, practically – in multivocal ways, befitting the polysemous creature that is kitsch itself. Drawing upon art history, popular culture studies, philosophy, and visual culture, the authors’ responses to the “big” question of kitsch move well beyond habitual artificial boundaries, far beyond the simple binaries of good/bad, high/low, elite/popular, or art/kitsch, into far more complex, challenging, and ultimately rewarding territory.

This thoroughly researched book provides the first comprehensive history of how a UNESCO World Heritage site on the Central China Plain, Longmen’s caves and the Buddhist statuary of Luoyang, was rediscovered in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Drawing on original research and archival sources in Chinese, English, French, German, Japanese, and Swedish, as well as extensive fieldwork, Dong Wang traces the ties between cultural heritage and modernity, detailing how this historical monument has been understood from antiquity to the present. She highlights the manifold traffic and expanded contact between China and other countries as these nations were reorienting themselves in order to adapt their own cultural traditions to newly industrialized and industrializing societies. Unknown to much of the world, Longmen and its mesmerizing modern history takes readers to the heartland of China, known as “Chinese Babylon” a century ago. With remarkable depth and breadth, this book unravels both a bygone and a continuing human pursuit of artefacts—shared, spiritual, modern, and above all beautiful that have linked so many lives, Chinese and foreign.

Thanks to Salem sea captains, Gilded Age millionaires, curators on horseback and missionaries gone native, North American museums now possess the greatest collections of Chinese art outside of East Asia itself. How did it happen? The China Collectors is the first full account of a century-long treasure hunt in China from the Opium Wars and the Boxer Rebellion to Mao Zedong's 1949 ascent. The principal gatherers are mostly little known and defy invention. They included "foreign devils" who braved desert sandstorms, bandits and local warlords in acquiring significant works. Adventurous curators like Langdon Warner, a forebear of Indiana Jones, argued that the caves of Dunhuang were already threatened by vandals, thereby justifying the removal of frescoes and sculptures. Other Americans include George Kates, an alumnus of Harvard, Oxford and Hollywood, who fell in love with Ming furniture. The Chinese were divided between dealers who profited from the artworks' removal, and scholars who sought to protect their country's patrimony. Duanfang, the greatest Chinese collector of his era, was beheaded in a coup and his splendid bronzes now adorn major museums. Others in this rich tapestry include Charles Lang Freer, an enlightened Detroit entrepreneur, two generations of Rockefellers, and Avery Brundage, the imperious Olympian, and Arthur Sackler, the grand acquisitor. No less important are two museum directors, Cleveland's Sherman Lee and Kansas City's Laurence Sickman, who challenged the East Coast's hegemony. Shareen Blair Brysac and Karl E. Meyer even-handedly consider whether ancient treasures were looted or salvaged, and whether it was morally acceptable to spirit hitherto inaccessible objects westward, where they could be studied and preserved by trained museum personnel. And how should the US and Canada and their museums respond now that China has the means and will to reclaim its missing patrimony?