Turbulent Streams: An Environmental History of Japan’s Rivers, 1600–1930 by Roderick Wilson

In Turbulent Streams: An Environmental History of Japan’s Rivers, 1600–1930, Roderick I. Wilson describes how the rivers of Japan are both hydrologically and historically dynamic. Today, these waterways are slowed, channeled, diverted, and dammed by a myriad of levees, multiton concrete tetrapods, and massive multipurpose dams. In part, this intensive engineering arises from the waterways falling great elevations over short distances, flowing over unstable rock and soil, and receiving large quantities of precipitation during monsoons and typhoons. But this modern river regime is also the product of a history that narrowed both these waterways and people’s diverse interactions with them in the name of flood control. Neither a story of technological progress nor environmental decline, this history introduces the concept of environmental relations as a category of historical analysis both to explore these fluvial interactions and reveal underappreciated dimensions of Japanese history.

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Integrated Korean Accelerated 1 by Young-mee Yu Cho, Ji-Young Jung, and Jeeyoung Ahn Ha

Integrated Korean: Accelerated 1 and 2 directly address the linguistic needs and abilities of heritage and accelerated learners in a single academic year. Volume 1 presents lessons on thematically organized subjects, starting with familiar topics such as family, friends, daily routines, schoolwork, campus activities, dining out, and shopping. Volume 2 advances to more formal subjects beyond family and friends, such as travel, transportation, housing, holidays, lifestyles, careers, and Korean history and culture. Students approach the lessons with multilevel communicative classroom activities and reading materials with standards-based exercises and projects that not only focus on the particular language requirements of heritage learners, but also encourage them to participate more fully in their own family and community life. Each volume’s textbook and workbook offer authentic conversations and texts in both informal and formal contexts, structured tasks, and a wealth of interesting and relevant cultural content.

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Sentiment, Reason, and Law: Policing in the Republic of China on Taiwan by Jeffrey Martin

What if the job of police was to cultivate the political will of a community to live with itself (rather than enforce law, keep order, or fight crime)? In Sentiment, Reason, and Law, Jeffrey T. Martin describes a world where that is the case.

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Engaging the Other: 'Japan' and Its Alter-Egos, 1550-1850 by Ronald Toby

In Engaging the Other: “Japan and Its Alter-Egos”, 1550-1850, Ronald P. Toby examines new discourses of identity and difference in early modern Japan, a discourse catalyzed by the “Iberian irruption,” the appearance of Portuguese and other new, radical others in the sixteenth century. The encounter with peoples and countries unimagined in earlier discourse provoked an identity crisis, a paradigm shift from a view of the world as comprising only “three countries” (sangoku), i.e., Japan, China and India, to a world of “myriad countries” ( bankoku) and peoples. In order to understand the new radical alterities, the Japanese were forced to establish new parameters of difference from familiar, proximate others, i.e., China, Korea and Ryukyu. Toby examines their articulation in literature, visual and performing arts, law, and customs.

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Monster of the Twentieth Century  by Robert Tierney 

This extended monograph examines the work of the radical journalist Kotoku Shusui and Japan’s anti-imperialist movement of the early twentieth century. It includes the first English translation of Imperialism (Teikokushugi), Kotoku’s classic 1901 work.

Kotoku Shusui was a Japanese socialist, anarchist, and critic of Japan’s imperial expansionism who was executed in 1911 for his alleged participation in a plot to kill the emperor. His Imperialism was one of the first systematic criticisms of imperialism published anywhere in the world.

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The Rise of Confucian Ritualism in Late Imperial China by Kai-Wing Chow

This pathbreaking work argues that the major intellectual trend in China from the seventeenth through the early nineteenth century was Confucian ritualism, as expressed in ethics, classical learning, and discourse on lineage.

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Remote Homeland, Recovered Borderland  by Dan Shao

Remote Homeland, Recovered Borderland addresses a long-ignored issue in the existing studies of community construction: How does the past failure of an ethnic people to maintain sovereignty over their homeland influence their contemporary reconfigurations of ethnic and national identities? To answer this question, Shao Dan focuses on the Manzus, the second largest non-Han group in contemporary China, whose cultural and historical ancestors, the Manchus, ruled China from 1644 to 1912. 

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