From the Renaissance to today, the idea that the Roman Republic lasted more than 450 years--persisting unbroken from the late sixth century to the mid-first century BC--has profoundly shaped how Roman history is understood, how the ultimate failure of Roman republicanism is explained, and how republicanism itself is defined. In Roman Republics, Harriet Flower argues for a completely new interpretation of republican chronology. Radically challenging the traditional picture of a single monolithic republic, she argues that there were multiple republics, each with its own clearly distinguishable strengths and weaknesses. While classicists have long recognized that the Roman Republic changed and evolved over time, Flower is the first to mount a serious argument against the idea of republican continuity that has been fundamental to modern historical study. By showing that the Romans created a series of republics, she reveals that there was much more change--and much less continuity--over the republican period than has previously been assumed. In clear and elegant prose, Roman Republics provides not only a reevaluation of one of the most important periods in western history but also a brief yet nuanced survey of Roman political life from archaic times to the end of the republican era.

In France's Third Republic, secularism was, for its adherents, a new faith, a civic religion founded on a rabid belief in progress and the Enlightenment conviction that men (and women) could remake their world. And yet with all of its pragmatic smoothing over of the supernatural edges of Catholicism, the Third Republic engendered its own fantastical ways of seeing by embracing observation, corporeal dynamism, and imaginative introspection. How these republican ideals and the new national education system of the 1870s and 80s - the structure meant to impart these ideals - shaped belle époque popular culture is the focus of this book. The author reassesses the meaning of secularization and offers a cultural history of this period by way of an interrogation of several fraught episodes which, although seemingly disconnected, shared an attachment to the potent moral and aesthetic directives of French republicanism: a village's battle to secularize its schools, a scandalous novel, a vaudeville hit featuring a nude celebrity, and a craze for female boxing. Beginning with the writer and performer Colette (1873-1954) as a point of entry, this re-evaluation of belle époque popular culture probes the startling connections between republican values of labor and physical health on the one hand, and the cultural innovations of the decades preceding World War I on the other.

Just about everyone from my country, República Dominicana, dreams of moving to New York City, except for me. On the flight to New York, my first time on a plane, my first time away from Mami, I was finally free to cry. But nothing came out. I watched as the green mountains of my beloved island slipped away far below. Fifteen-year-old Nina Perez is faced with a future she never expected. She must leave her Garden of Eden, her lush island home in Samana, Dominican Republic, when she's sent by her mother to live with her brother, Darrio, in New York, to seek out a better life. As Nina searches for some glimpse of familiarity amid the urban and jarring world of Washington Heights, she learns to uncover her own strength and independence. She finds a way to grow, just like the orchids that blossom on her fire escape. And as she is confronted by ugly secrets about her brother's business, she comes to understand the realities of life in this new place. But then she meets him—that tall, green-eyed boy—one that she can't erase from her thoughts, who just might help her learn to see beauty in spite of tragedy. From the acclaimed author of the color of my words comes a powerful story of a girl who must make her way in a new world and find her place within it.

What does it mean to be Chinese? How did the major political events of the early 20th century affect the everyday lives of ordinary people in China? This book uses a wealth of new sources, including newspapers, memoirs, interviews, and photographs, to look at the political history of the period and to understand the ways in which politics intersected with the thoughts and feelings of ordinary people. To be a modern citizen of the Chinese republic meant repudiating much of the very ritual that had previously defined one as Chinese. As we follow the changes in everyday life, ranging from the unbinding of women's feet to the commemoration of the events of the a new republican history, we see the complex interactions between an ever more activist state and its new citizens.

The Chinese Hsinhai Revolution explores and explains for the first time the important role of G. E. Morrison in great power diplomacy in China from the end of the Russo-Japanese War to the overthrow of the Qing Dynasty. The work is based on a wide range of multinational scholarly sources and in order to develop the context in which Morrison carried out his personal diplomacy and to delineate the many-sided story into which Morrison has to be placed, Woodhouse has in addition to mining the very rich Morrison collection, drawn upon British, Japanese and American personal and official materials.