This lively and engaging text offers a panorama of modern Chinese history through compelling biographies of the famous and obscure. Spanning five hundred years, they include a Ming dynasty medical pioneer, a Qing dynasty courtesan, a nineteenth-century Hong Kong business leader, a Manchu princess, an arsenal manager, a woman soldier, and a young maid in contemporary Beijing. Through the lives of these diverse people, readers will gain an understanding of the complex questions of modern Chinese history: What did it mean to be Chinese, and how did that change over time? How was learning encouraged and directed in imperial and post-imperial China? Was it possible to challenge entrenched gender roles? What effects did European imperialism have on Chinese lives? How did ordinary Chinese experience the warfare and political upheaval of twentieth-century China? What is the nature of the gap between urban and rural China in the post-Mao years? These richly researched biographies are written in an accessible and appealing style that will engage all readers interested in modern China. Contributions by: Daria Berg, John M. Carroll, Kenneth J. Hammond, Joshua H. Howard, Fabio Lanza, Oliver Moore, Pan Yihong, Hugh Shapiro, Kristin Stapleton, and Shuo Wang

The Human Tradition in Premodern China is a collection of biographical essays revealing the variety and complexity of human experience in China from the earliest historical times to the dawn of the modern age. p China is a vast country with a long history, and one which is by itself as complex as the history of Europe. This broad expanse of time and space in Chinese history has largely been approached in terms of narrative political and cultural history in most books. The reigns of emperors and the thoughts of the great masters such as Confucius or Laozi have been the principal focus. Yet the history of the Chinese, as with any great people, is built up from the lives of individuals, families, groups, and movements. By presenting life stories of individuals ranging from ancient court diviners to late imperial merchants to women in various periods, this engaging anthology highlights aspects of Chinese social, political and intellectual history not usually addressed. Additionally, The Human Tradition in Premodern China broadens the common image and understanding of society based on the dominant elite male discourse.p Rich in new perspective and new scholarship, The Human Tradition in Premodern China is an ideal introduction to Chinese history, East Asian history, and world history.p

This rich collection of biographies of African men and women adds a crucial human dimension to our understanding of African history since 1800. The last two centuries have been a time of enormous change on the continent, and these life stories show how people survived by resisting European conquest and colonial rule, by collaborating with colonial powers, or by finding a middle way to live their lives through tumultuous times. Bringing the story to the present, the book traces the era of independence since the 1960s through challenges to the rule of African dictators, struggles for the rights of women and mothers, the exploitation of youth and child soldiers, and economic booms and busts. By recounting the lives of real, identifiable people from societies across Africa south of the Sahara and from African communities in Europe, this unique book underscores the importance and power of individual agency in understanding the recent African past, a vital complement to analyses of broader, impersonal socialand economic factors.

This engaging and humanizing text traces the development of Europe since the mid-eighteenth century through the lives of people of the time. Capturing key moments, themes, and events in the continent's turbulent modern past, the book explores how ordinary Europeans both shaped their societies and were affected by larger historical processes. By focusing on the lives of individual actors, both famous and obscure, students can gain a sense for how the well-known revolutions, wars, and social transformations of the modern era were experienced in private homes, work places, political forums, and on battlefields throughout the region. Fittingly, the book opens with the French Revolution and concludes with the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of Eastern European communism. Throughout, the contributors use compelling biographies to examine many of the major events and developments in European history, including the age of reaction and revolutions in the early nineteenth century; industrialization; Victorianism; new imperialism; fin de si cle culture; the first and second World Wars; the Russian Revolution; Italian fascism, Nazism, the Holocaust, and decolonization; Americanization; and the 1968 youth revolts. Contributions by: Karin Breuer, Helen Harden Chenut, John Cox, Stephen P. Frank, Cora Granata, Maura E. Hametz, Michael Kilburn, Cheryl A. Koos, Robert A. McLain, Karen Petrone, Paolo Scrivano, Alyssa Goldstein Sepinwall, Matthew G. Stanard, Michele M. Strong, and Patricia Tilburg

This book analyses modernity and tradition in China today and how they combine in striking ways in the Chinese school. Paul Willis – the leading ethnographer and author of Learning to Labour – shows how China has undergone an internal migration not only of masses of workers but also of a mental and ideological kind to new cultural landscapes of meaning, which include worship of the glorified city, devotion to consumerism, and fixation upon the smartphone and the internet. Massive educational expansion has been a precondition for explosive economic growth and technical development, but at the same time the school provides a cultural stage for personal and collective experience. In its closed walls and the inescapability of its ‘scores’, an astonishing drama plays out between the new and the old, with a tapestry of intricate human meanings woven of small tragedies and triumphs, secret promises and felt betrayals, helping to produce not only exam results but cultural orientations and occupational destinies. By exploring the cultural dimension of everyday experience as it is lived out in the school, this book sheds new light on the enormous transformations that have swept through China and created the kind of society that it is today: a society that is obsessed with the future and at the same time structured by and in continuous dialogue with its past.

Sweeping across more than two centuries, this compelling book introduces readers to some of the major themes in Imperial Russia. In a set of engaging essays, the contributors present richly human stories of individual and group experiences, as well as of key events in Russian history. We see the effects of reforms; the consequences of an economy and society built on serfdom; as well as the development of a civil society, the "woman question," urbanization, secularization, and modernity. As this book vividly shows, individuals, groups, and events raised out of obscurity remind us of the messiness of everyday life; of people's dreams, frustrations, and transformations; as well as of their sense of self and the community around them.

The Human Tradition in Colonial Latin America is an anthology of stories of largely ordinary individuals struggling to forge a life during the unstable colonial period in Latin America. These mini-biographies vividly show the tensions that emerged when the political, social, religious, and economic ideals of the Spanish and Portuguese colonial regimes and the Roman Catholic Church conflicted with the realities of daily living in the Americas. Now fully updated with new and revised essays, the book is carefully balanced among countries and ethnicities. Within an overall theme of social order and disorder in a colonial setting, the stories bring to life issues of gender; race and ethnicity; conflicts over religious orthodoxy; and crime, violence, and rebellion. Written by leading scholars, the essays are specifically designed to be readable and interesting. Ideal for the Latin American history survey and for courses on colonial Latin American history, this fresh and human text will engage as well as inform students. Contributions by: Rolena Adorno, Kenneth J. Andrien, Christiana Borchart de Moreno, Joan Bristol, Noble David Cook, Marcela Echeverri, Lyman L. Johnson, Mary Karasch, Alida C. Metcalf, Kenneth Mills, Muriel S. Nazzari, Ana María Presta, Susan E. Ramírez, Matthew Restall, Zeb Tortorici, Camilla Townsend, Ann Twinam, and Nancy E. van Deusen.