Human beings have always smoked, and they probably always will. Every culture in recorded history has smoked something, whether as a cure or for pleasure, whether as part of a ritual or as an aspect of popular culture. It is curious, then, that no history of smoking has been written based on the assumption that smoking in all of its forms and products is a cultural phenomenon common to all human societies.
Smoke: A Global History of Smoking examines the culture of smoking in different traditions and locations around the world. From opium dens in Victorian England to tobacco in Edo...

In 1958, China's revered leader Mao Zedong instituted a program designed to transform his giant nation into a Communist utopia. Called the Great Leap Forward, Mao's grand scheme--like so many other utopian dreams of the 20th century--proved a monumental disaster, resulting in the mass destruction of China's agriculture, industry, and trade while leaving large portions of the countryside forever scarred by man-made environmental disasters. The resulting three-year famine claimed the lives of more than 45 million people in China. In this remarkable oral history of modern China's greatest...

While prejudice against Jews is a real and ongoing category in Western culture, little attention has been paid to the myths of the Jews' and their impact in countries outside the West. This work draws on a wide variety of source materials from the past two centuries to examine the images of the Jews' as constructed in China. However, the interest here does not lie in the determination of the boundary between the real and fictional aspects of these images. Rather, it lies in the implications associated with the Jew' as an other', which remains a distant mirror in the construction of the self'...