This book is at once a cultural history of Japanese American kinship and a contribution to the study of the contemporary kinship system of the United States. It brings to the analysis of American kinship a theoretical perspective that attends to the historically situated, symbolic processes through which people interpret and thereby transform their kinship relations. By examining kinship change among Japanese Americans, I elucidate a particular case of a general process I take as having been central to the development of contemporary American kinship. For, while Japanese Americans have a unique and rich cultural heritage and a distinctive and troubled social history, the process of kinship change they have undergone since the turn of the century has been shared by many other Americans. I begin with the premise that kinship relations are structured by symbolic relations and serve symbolic functions as well as social ones. It follows from this that kinship change involves symbolic processes, and that a study of it must attend to the manner in which relations among symbols, meanings, and actions have shaped relations among people. My second premise is that we can comprehend the system of symbols and meanings structuring people's kinship relations in the present only if we know their kinship relations in the past. If symbolic systems help people answer the questions and cope with the problems of meaning they confront in their everyday lives, symbolic analysis can only be enriched by a knowledge of the social history that has given rise to these questions and problems. Conversely, we can comprehend that social history only if we comprehend the system of symbols and meanings through which people interpret and thereby transform the past. In this study I treat the oral kinship autobiographies I elicited from first- and second-generation Japanese Americans in Seattle, Washington, both as cultural tales and as accounts with a good degree of historical veracity. Because people's recollections of the past are reasonably accurate and do not obliterate facts so much as reinterpret them, they can be mined to reconstruct a social history of events and actions. At the same time they can be used, along with what people say about the present, as material for a symbolic analysis. Unlike most Japanese Americans, and most of those who have studied them, I do not uncritically assume a timeless past of "Japanese tradition" in which stem-family households were endlessly reproduced by people who obeyed the "rules of the Japanese family system." Instead, on the one hand, I reconstruct kinship relations in Japan from immigrants' accounts of their kinship biographies and, on the other, regard the Japanese past and the American present that figure so centrally in these accounts as complex symbols whose meanings must be explicated. The analytic strategy I have formulated for this study is one I think can be usefully applied to groups besides Japanese Americans and other ethnic groups whose conceptions of their particular cultural traditions and experiences as immigrants are similarly prominent in their discourse on kinship relations. It can help us better understand the social and symbolic processes shaping kinship even among those sectors of our society whose ethnicity has been made invisible by hegemonic processes that cast a particular cultural system as a generalized American one. For whether they view themselves as having an ethnic past that is Polish, Italian, African, English, or, in the case of "just plain American," one supposedly unmarked by ethnicity, all these folk commonly speak of a "traditional" past in opposition to the "modern" present. Like Japanese Americans, they too construct tradition by reconceptualizing the past in relation to the meaning of their actions in the present, thereby transforming past and present in a dialectic of interpretation.

Heritage became a target during the Yugoslav Wars as part of ethnic cleansing and urbicide. Out of the ashes of war, pasts were remodelled, places took on new layers of meaning, and a wave of new memorialization took hold. Three decades since the fall of Vukovar and the end of the siege of Sarajevo, and more than a decade since Kosovo’s Declaration of Independence, conflict has shifted from armed confrontations to battles about the past. The former Yugoslavia has been described on the one hand as a bastion of plurality and multiculturalism, and on the other, as a territory of antagonism and radical nationalisms, echoing imaginaries and narratives relevant to Europe as a whole. With Croatia having entered the EU in 2013 and the continuous political contestation in the region, wounds in the memory fabric of the former Yugoslavia have once more come to the world’s attention. Thus, there is the question what will happen when the former republics are ‘reunited’ once more under the EU umbrella, itself beset by increasing populisms, nationalisms, and the looming prospects of territorial fragmentation. This collection scrutinizes the role of heritage in ‘conflict-time’, inquires what role the past might have in creating new identities at the local, regional, national, and supra-national levels, and investigates the dynamics of heritage as a process.

We are all our history. Yet despite curricular revisions, the mainstream historical narrative that shapes the way we teach students about the Canadian nation can be divisive, separating “us” from “them.” Responding to the evolving demographics of an ethnically and culturally heterogeneous population, Transforming the Canadian History Classroom calls for an innovative approach that instead places students – the stories they carry and the histories they want to be part of – at the centre of history education. Samantha Cutrara explores how teaching practices and institutional contexts can support ideas of connection, complexity, and care in order to engender meaningful learning and foster a student-centric history education. Applying insights gained from student and teacher interviews and case studies in schools, Transforming the Canadian History Classroom delineates a learning environment in which students can investigate the historical narratives that infuse their lives and imagine a future that makes room for their diverse identities.

A volume of essays by Japan’s leading female scholars and activists exploring their country’s recent progressive cultural shift. When the feminist movement finally arrived in Japan in the 1990s, no one could have foreseen the wide-ranging changes it would bring to the country. Nearly every aspect of contemporary life has been impacted, from marital status to workplace equality, education, politics, and sexuality. Now more than ever, the Japanese myth of a homogenous population living within traditional gender roles is being challenged. The LGBTQ population is coming out of the closet, ever-present minorities are mobilizing for change, single mothers are a growing population, and women are becoming political leaders. In Transforming Japan, Kumiko Fujimura-Fanselow has gathered the most comprehensive collection of essays written by Japanese educators and researchers on the ways in which present-day Japan confronts issues of gender, sexuality, race, discrimination, power, and human rights.

A panoramic global history of the nineteenth century A monumental history of the nineteenth century, The Transformation of the World offers a panoramic and multifaceted portrait of a world in transition. Jürgen Osterhammel, an eminent scholar who has been called the Braudel of the nineteenth century, moves beyond conventional Eurocentric and chronological accounts of the era, presenting instead a truly global history of breathtaking scope and towering erudition. He examines the powerful and complex forces that drove global change during the "long nineteenth century," taking readers from New York to New Delhi, from the Latin American revolutions to the Taiping Rebellion, from the perils and promise of Europe's transatlantic labor markets to the hardships endured by nomadic, tribal peoples across the planet. Osterhammel describes a world increasingly networked by the telegraph, the steamship, and the railways. He explores the changing relationship between human beings and nature, looks at the importance of cities, explains the role slavery and its abolition played in the emergence of new nations, challenges the widely held belief that the nineteenth century witnessed the triumph of the nation-state, and much more. This is the highly anticipated English edition of the spectacularly successful and critically acclaimed German book, which is also being translated into Chinese, Polish, Russian, and French. Indispensable for any historian, The Transformation of the World sheds important new light on this momentous epoch, showing how the nineteenth century paved the way for the global catastrophes of the twentieth century, yet how it also gave rise to pacifism, liberalism, the trade union, and a host of other crucial developments.

Chemistry explores the way atoms interact, the constitution of the stars, and the human genome. Knowledge of chemistry makes it possible for us to manufacture dyes and antibiotics, metallic alloys, and other materials that contribute to the necessities and luxuries of human life. In Transforming Matter, noted historian Trevor H. Levere emphasizes that understanding the history of these developments helps us to appreciate the achievements of generations of chemists. Levere examines the dynamic rise of chemistry from the study of alchemy in the seventeenth century to the development of organic and inorganic chemistry in the age of government-funded research and corporate giants. In the past two centuries, he points out, the number of known elements has quadrupled. And because of synthesis, chemistry has increasingly become a science that creates much of what it studies. Throughout the book, Levere follows a number of recurring themes: theories about the elements, the need for classification, the status of chemical science, and the relationship between practice and theory. He illustrates these themes by concentrating on some of chemistry's most influential and innovative practitioners. Transforming Matter provides an accessible and clearly written introduction to the history of chemistry, telling the story of how the discipline has developed over the years.

This volume offers the reader information on scientific discoveries from early man to World War II, offering a view of world events.