The 'Opening of Japan' has been central to the retelling of Japan's modern history. Reopening the Opening of Japan fundamentally reconsiders what that historical moment entailed. What did intensified connections between Japan and the world mean both inside and outside of the country, and what does this tell us about Japan's historical significance on a global scale? The chapters excavate a rich array of surprising cross-border connections, from the global trade in mummified mermaids to the Japanese-Russian intellectual links underpinning the work of Akira Kurosawa. Re-thinking connectivity through non-state transnational perspectives, the book guides readers to new ways of doing and writing history. Contributors are: Lewis Bremner, Natalia Doan, Manimporok Dotulong, Maki Fukuoka, Eiko Honda, Sho Konishi, Mateja Kovacic, Joel Littler, Chinami Oka, Yu Sakai, Olga Solovieva, and Warren Stanislaus.

The dramatic story of hundreds of senior citizens left in the path of a ferocious firestorm and what the quest for accountability reveals about the increasing risks to our most vulnerable population. “…a powerful work of investigative journalism about a particularly vulnerable segment of the population…. Alongside an engrossing account of the emergency as it unfolded in Sonoma County, Belden and Gullixson provide a definitive account of management’s woefully inadequate response at the two sister facilities. Their findings are a lesson to other care facilities —here’s what not to do.” —San Francisco Chronicle Just after midnight on October 9, 2017, as one of the nation’s deadliest and most destructive firestorms swept over California’s Wine Country, hundreds of elderly residents from two posh senior living facilities were caught in its path. The frailest were blind, in wheelchairs, or diagnosed with dementia, and their community quickly transformed from a palatial complex that pledged to care for them to one that threatened to entomb them. The rescue of the final 105 seniors left behind on an inflamed hillside depended not on employees, but strangers whose lives intersected in a riveting tale of terror and heroism. Headlines blamed caregivers for abandonment and neglect, but the truth proved far more complex—leading to a battle for accountability that stretched from the courtroom to the state legislature, and ultimately, to the ballot box. Inflamed: Abandonment, Heroism, and Outrage in Wine Country’s Deadliest Firestorm is the gripping and emotional narrative detailing what happened to these seniors, employees, and rescuers before, during, and after the Tubbs Fire decimated portions of Santa Rosa, including Oakmont Senior Living Villa Capri and part of Varenna at Fountaingrove. Anne Belden and Paul Gullixson are professional journalists and Sonoma County residents who spent three years recording each phase of the disaster in agonizing detail—from the botched evacuation and its excruciating aftermath to the investigations, lawsuits, and breakdowns that followed. They tell this harrowing story with a veracity and compassion only achieved by experienced reporters with local roots. Their narrative revisits the horrors of 2017 but also asks the reader to look to the future and consider how their community’s most vulnerable will fare as ten thousand Baby Boomers retire each day, the for-profit assisted living industry rapidly expands, and the climate becomes more volatile. If this travesty can happen at high-end senior living complexes, it can happen anywhere.

This book explores the religious teachings of best-selling Victorian author and former Member of Parliament, Laurence Oliphant (1829–1888). While several biographies have been written on his captivating life, the stage of his life when Oliphant first established ‘The Household' commune has, until now, been largely unexplored. This book focuses on this later stage of his life, exploring Oliphant’s religious teachings. Additionally, this study incorporates a newly discovered archive, which reveals many behind-the-scenes details of The Household's teachings. Jeffrey D. Lavoie shows that Oliphant provided a unique interpretation of sexuality from a mystical Christian perspective, which opposed the restrictive contemporaneous “Victorian morality."

When Margaret Hamilton’s father rescues Elizabethan manuscripts from a flooded tomb, he asks his daughter’s former fiancé Stephen to help decipher them, bringing the couple back together again. At first, the documents only seem to resurrect Anne Vavasour’s remarkable true story: how she came to Queen Elizabeth’s court as a sixteen-year-old Maid of Honour; was seduced by the Earl of Oxford; delivered a babe at court in the attending maidens’ chamber; was sent to the Tower; yet later flourished for twenty years as the mistress of the wealthy widower Sir Henry Lee, Elizabeth’s champion at the joust (and rumored half-brother of the queen). But when Margaret and Stephen uncover links between the buried papers and Shakespeare’s Macbeth, ruthless art and antiquities thieves scheme to take the priceless papers at any cost. Blending fiction with little-known facts from history and research, The Vavasour Macbeth ranges from the Elizabethan and Jacobean courts to modern-day England, revealing many mysteries of ancient handwriting, manuscripts, and playmaking along the way. Not all facts taught in school about the Elizabethan era, Shakespeare, and Macbeth are proven, and you may be surprised to learn how many questions really do remain open and unsolved.

Charmian Kittredge London (1871–1955) was the epitome of a modern woman. Free-spirited and adventurous, she defied modern expectations of femininity. Today she is best known as the wife of the famous American author Jack London, yet she was a literary trailblazer in her own right. This biography is the first book to tell the complete story of Charmian’s life—freed from the shadow cast by her famous husband. In this biography, Iris Jamahl Dunkle draws the reader into Charmian’s private and public worlds, underscoring her literary achievements and the significant role she played in promoting her husband’s legacy. Her life, as Dunkle emphasizes, required fortitude and bravery, and in many ways it paralleled the history of the American West. Born on the mudflats of what would become Los Angeles’s harbor, Charmian became an orphan at age fourteen. Raised by her aunt Netta Wiley Ames, a noted writer and editor for the Overland Monthly, Charmian attended college, became an expert equestrian and concert pianist, and had a successful career as a stenographer. But her life shifted when, in 1905, she married Jack London, already a bestselling author. For the rest of Jack’s life, until his untimely death at the age of forty, reporters would follow the couple’s every move. Charmian and Jack traveled the world, exploring and writing together. In addition to collaborating with Jack on many of his projects, Charmian wrote three books about her travels, as well as countless articles. After Jack’s death in 1916, she remained a celebrity, continuing to travel and write—and seek adventure. She also wrote a biography about her late husband and managed his estate, influencing how Jack’s literary legacy was remembered. Charmian Kittredge London is a central figure in California cultural history. Now, thanks to Dunkle’s riveting portrait, readers have the opportunity to embark on the grand adventure that was her life.

Journalist and historian Gaye LeBaron first learned of Thomas Lake Harris and his Brotherhood in the 1960s when the deserted winery, champagne cellars and empty mansion still stood at the old Fountaingrove. She was to learn that there were stories to be told swirling all around that hilltop, including the adventures of a young Samurai that forged "the Japanese connection" with Santa Rosa.Author Bart Casey stumbled on Thomas Lake Harris on the poetry shelves of the Harvard library when he was a student there. Curiosity led him to the many-layered story of Laurence Oliphant, a Harris disciple, and the other "characters" on this journey to Utopia. His book, The Double Life of Laurence Oliphant, was published in 2015.The two authors' first meeting, at LeBaron's archives in the Schulz Library's Special Collections at Sonoma State University, resulted in a five-year collaboration and their mutual effort to tell "the whole story."

In 1916 Arthur Conan Doyle stated his belief in Spiritualism. "The Edge of the Unknown", first published in 1930, is a collection of articles covering various aspects of this subject.