Liu Yuan’s Lingyan ge, a woodblock-printed book from 1669, re-creates a portrait gallery that memorialized 24 vassals of the early Tang court. This study examines the dialogues created among the texts and images in Lingyan ge from multiple perspectives. Anne Burkus-Chasson argues that despite a general epistemological shift toward visual forms of knowledge in the seventeenth century, looking and reading were still seen as being in conflict. This conflict plays out among the leaves of Liu Yuan’s book.

Through a series of essays by urban historians, economists, and designers, Makina/Medina examines the potential impact of cultural events on the revitalization of historic cities. The aim of this volume is to explore how the urban design set up for a cultural event could help improve access and legibility in this medieval city and to positively affect its economic and social development. The book also includes a series of hypothetical design projects for the Makina Square by Harvard Graduate School of Design students.

This book is about the ritual world of a group of rural settlements in Shanxi province in pre-1949 North China. The great festivals described in this book were their supreme collective achievements and were carried out virtually without assistance from local officials or educated elites, clerical or lay. Newly discovered liturgical manuscripts allow author David Johnston to reconstruct North Chinese temple festivals in unprecedented detail and prove that they are sharply different from the Daoist- and Buddhist-based communal rituals of South China.

In this enlightening book, with a new preface and postscript for the Anglophone audience, Maurice Olender investigates the unsuspected links between erudition and race, showing the affinities between the social sciences and the concept of “race.” The book provides an accessible and lucid pathway through the labyrinth of race and erudition and examines how to deal with diversity without the problematic heritage of racial stereotypes.

This study revolves around the career of Kobayashi Hideo (1902–1983), one of the seminal figures in the history of modern Japanese literary criticism, whose interpretive vision was forged amidst the cultural and ideological crises that dominated intellectual discourse between the 1920s and the 1940s. Although his interweaving of aesthetics and ideology exhibited elements of both resistance and complicity, his critical ethos served ultimately to undergird his wartime fascist stance by encouraging acquiescence to authority, championing patriotism, and calling for more vigorous thought control.

The Historia Tolteca-Chichimeca was created at a pivotal transitional moment, bridging an era when pictorial manuscripts dominated and one that witnessed the rising hegemony of alphabetic texts. Script and Glyph is a particularly appropriate volume for Dumbarton Oaks, as it crosses the boundaries of Pre-Columbian and Landscape areas of study. The volume is beautifully illustrated with color images from the manuscript itself.

Following the end of World War II in Asia, the Allied powers repatriated over six million Japanese nationals from colonies and battlefields throughout Asia and deported more than a million colonial subjects from Japan to their countries of origin. Lori Watt analyzes how the human remnants of empire, those who were moved and those who were left behind, served as sites of negotiation in the process of the jettisoning of the colonial project and in the creation of new national identities in Japan. 

Seventeen years after the civil war in El Salvador came to an end, violence and insecurity continue to shape the daily lives of many Salvadorans. This book examines the phenomenon of youth gangs, as well as related police abuse, clandestine violence, and their collective impact on the rule of law. The book’s findings are based on primary research conducted in El Salvador between 2006 and 2008.

Eating Rice from Bamboo Roots charts the vicissitudes of a rural community of papermakers in Sichuan. The process of transforming bamboo into paper involves production-related and social skills, as well as the everyday skills that allowed these papermakers to survive in an era of tumultuous change. This book traces the changes in the distribution of knowledge that led to a massive transfer of technical control from villages to cities, from primary producers to managerial elites, and from women to men. It addresses the issue of how revolution, state-making, and marketization have changed rural China.

Clinging to a rugged hillside in the lush valley of Sparta lies Mistra, one of the most dramatically beautiful Byzantine cities in Greece, a place steeped in history, myth, and romance. Sir Steven Runciman, one of the most distinguished historians of the Byzantine period, traveled to Mistra on numerous occasions and became enchanted with the place. Now published in paperback for the first time, Lost Capital of Byzantium tells the story of this once-great city—its rise and fall and its place in the history of the Peloponnese and the Byzantine empire.

On the eve of World War I, Russia, not known as a nation of joiners, had thousands of voluntary associations. Joseph Bradley examines the crucial role of voluntary associations in the development of civil society in Russia from the late eighteenth to the early twentieth century.

The androgynous, asexual Buddha of contemporary popular imagination stands in stark contrast to the muscular, virile, and sensual figure presented in Indian Buddhist texts. In this groundbreaking study of previously unexplored aspects of the early Buddhist tradition, John Powers skillfully adapts methodological approaches from European and North American historiography to the study of early Buddhist literature, art, and iconography, highlighting aspects of the tradition that have been surprisingly invisible in earlier scholarship. 

In only a few species do males strategically employ violence to control female sexuality. Why are females routinely abused in some species, but never in others? And can the study of such unpleasant behavior help us to understand the evolution of men’s violence against women? The book presents extensive field research and analysis to evaluate sexual coercion in a range of species—including all of the great apes and humans—and to clarify its role in shaping social relationships among males, among females, and between the sexes.

This latest title in a strikingly beautiful series of collectable books turns our attention to the rich variety of art from the Ancient Americas. Beginning by asking what constitutes Ancient American art, Colin McEwan contextualizes this art in its complexity of form and meaning. The beauty of the smallest details is magnified and contextualized through accompanying essays written by experts in Ancient American art.

Since the 1950s, Abe Kobo (1924–1993) has achieved an international reputation for his surreal or grotesque brand of avant-garde literature. Christopher Bolton explores how this reconciliation of ideas and dialects is for Abe part of the process whereby texts and individuals form themselves—a search for identity that must take place at the level of the self and society at large.

From Tin Pan Alley to grand opera, player-pianos to phonograph records, David Suisman’s Selling Sounds explores the rise of music as big business and the creation of a radically new musical culture. Provocative, original, and lucidly written, Selling Sounds reveals the commercial architecture of America’s musical life.

In Hope and Despair, Gerald Grant compares two cities—his hometown of Syracuse, New York, and Raleigh, North Carolina—in order to examine the consequences of the nation’s ongoing educational inequities. The result is an ambitious portrait—sometimes disturbing, often inspiring—of two cities that exemplify our nation’s greatest educational challenges, as well as a passionate exploration of the potential for school reform that exists for our urban schools today.

In late prehistory, the ancestors of the present-day Hopi in Arizona created a unique and spectacular painted pottery tradition referred to as Hopi Yellow Ware. This ceramic tradition inspired Hopi potter Nampeyo’s revival pottery at the turn of the twentieth century. Extending the Peabody’s influential Awatovi project of the 1930s, Symbols in Clay calls into question deep-seated assumptions about pottery production and specialization in the precontact American Southwest.

The vast majority of the global population acquires citizenship purely by accidental circumstances of birth. In The Birthright Lottery, Ayelet Shachar argues that birthright citizenship in an affluent society can be thought of as a form of property inheritance: that is, a valuable entitlement transmitted by law to a restricted group of recipients under conditions that perpetuate the transfer of this prerogative to their heirs. 

“Are you an American, or are you not?” This is the question at the heart of Katherine Benton-Cohen’s provocative history, which ties that seemingly remote corner of the country to one of America’s central concerns: the historical creation of racial boundaries. By showing the multiple possibilities for racial meanings in America, Benton-Cohen’s insightful and informative work challenges our assumptions about race and national identity.

Mothers and Others finds the key in the primatologically unique length of human childhood. Renowned anthropologist Sarah Hrdy argues that if human babies were to survive in a world of scarce resources, they would need to be cared for, not only by their mothers but also by siblings, aunts, fathers, friends—and, with any luck, grandmothers. Out of this complicated and contingent form of childrearing, Hrdy argues, came the human capacity for understanding others. In essence, mothers and others teach us who will care, and who will not.

In The Program Era, Mark McGurl offers a fundamental reinterpretation of postwar American fiction, asserting that it can be properly understood only in relation to the rise of mass higher education and the creative writing program. An engaging and stylishly written examination of an era we thought we knew, The Program Era will be at the center of debates about postwar literature and culture for years to come.

That rosy tomato perched on your plate in December is at the end of a great journey—not just over land and sea, but across a vast and varied cultural history. This is the territory charted in Fresh. Freidberg takes six common foods from the refrigerator to discover what each has to say about our notions of freshness. Local livelihoods; global trade; the politics of taste, community, and environmental change: all enter into this lively, surprising, yet sobering tale about the nature and cost of our hunger for freshness.

The combined Dumbarton Oaks and Fogg collection of Byzantine seals is one of the largest in the world, containing 17,000 specimens. Volume 6 in the catalogue presents the seals of emperors and patriarchs of Constantinople. More than 250 seals are illustrated and accompanied—where appropriate—by a full commentary regarding each specimen’s date, biographical information on its owner, peculiarities of orthography, and iconographic features. 

No book more vividly explains the horror of American slavery and the emotional impetus behind the antislavery movement than Frederick Douglass’s Narrative. In an introductory essay, Robert Stepto re-examines the extraordinary life and achievement of a man who escaped from slavery to become a leading abolitionist and one of America's most important writers. The John Harvard Library text reproduces the first edition, published in Boston in 1845.

Africa has always played a role in black identity, but it was in the tumultuous period between the two world wars that black Americans first began to embrace a modern African American identity. Throwing off the legacy of slavery and segregation, black intellectuals, activists, and organizations sought a prouder past in ancient Egypt and forged links to contemporary Africa. Their consciousness of a dual identity anticipated the hyphenated identities of new immigrants in the years after World War II, and an emerging sense of what it means to be a modern American.

Traditionally, the concept of quality of life has been viewed through objective indicators of living conditions, basic needs, or capabilities. In Beyond Facts, the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) looks at quality of life through the perceptions of millions of Latin Americans. Using an enhanced version of the recently created Gallup World Poll that incorporates Latin America–specific questions, the IDB surveyed people from throughout the region and found that reality and perceptions of quality of life are often very different. Beyond Facts attempts to explain these differences and consider their implications for both politics and policy.

The Uyghurs, a Turkic group, account for half the population of the Xinjiang region in northwestern China. This ethnography presents a thick description of life in the Uyghur suburbs of Yining, a city near the border with Kazakhstan, and situates that account in a broader examination of Uyghur culture. The narrative is framed around the terms identity, community, and masculinity. As the author shows, Yining’s Uyghurs express a set of individual and collective identities organized around place, gender, family relations, friendships, occupation, and religious practice. 

Chinese officials put considerable effort into managing the fiscal and legal affairs of their jurisdictions, but they also devoted significant time and energy to performing religious rituals on behalf of the state. This groundbreaking study explores this underappreciated aspect of Chinese political life by investigating rainmaking activities organized or conducted by local officials in the Qing dynasty.

In The Ethos of a Late-Modern Citizen, Stephen K. White contends that Western democracies face novel challenges demanding our reexamination of the role of citizens. White argues that the intense focus in the past three decades on finding general principles of justice for diversity-rich societies needs to be complemented by an exploration of what sort of ethos would be needed to adequately sustain any such principles. Accessible, pithy, and erudite, The Ethos of a Late-Modern Citizen will appeal to a wide audience.

Everyone in academia stresses quality. But what exactly is it, and how do professors identify it? Michèle Lamont observed deliberations for fellowships and research grants, and interviewed panel members at length. In How Professors Think, she reveals what she discovered about this secretive, powerful, peculiar world. Lamont aims to illuminate the confidential process of evaluation and to push the gatekeepers to both better understand and perform their role.

Pulitzer Prize–winner Steven Hahn’s provocative new book challenges deep-rooted views in the writing of American and African-American history. Moving from slave emancipations of the eighteenth century through slave activity during the Civil War and on to the black power movements of the twentieth century, he asks us to rethink African-American history and politics in bolder, more dynamic terms. Throughout, Hahn presents African Americans as central actors in the arenas of American politics, while emphasizing traditions of self-determination, self-governance, and self-defense.

This volume is a bilingual collection of shaman oral texts from the Bhuji Valley of Western Nepal, in the original Nepali and with line-by-line English translation. Accompanying the book is a DVD of audio recordings of the shaman oral texts, supplementary texts not included in the published volume, videos of shaman performances, and additional video and photographic documentation of the social context in which these shamans are found.

The more than two dozen Rai languages in eastern Nepal, which make up the larger part of the Kiranti language family, are linguistically highly varied. This volume, which includes introductory chapters to Rai mythology and Rai grammar, for the first time brings together different variants of myths from various Rai languages, presenting them with linguistic glossings in interlinear translations. The book is of special interest to linguists, anthropologists, and folklorists with a focus on the Himalayas.