Kategoria BISAC: History >> Asia - General

The political transformation of Taiwan from an authoritarian regime into a democracy is one of the great political sagas of the 20th century. Defeated on the China mainland, the Kuomintang established a new polity on Taiwan that allowed for four remarkable patterns of political development. These patterns reflect a complex political process of behavioral and institutional change in which the key requisites for democracy now exist in Taiwan. Taiwan's history of citizen participation in direct elections, along with the political institutional changes narrated here by Chao and Myers, produced...

Winner of the Urban History Association's 2005 Best Book in Non-North American Urban History Award.

In traditional Chinese cities, a lively street culture was an important part of popular culture, and street life was central to the daily lives of city dwellers, especially the lower classes. This book examines street culture in Chengdu, an under-studied inland city, during the transformative decades between 1870 and 1930, in order to explore various topics: the relationship between urban commoners and public space; the role that community and neighborhood played in public life; how...

In his extraordinarily influential book Orientalism, Edward Said argued that Western knowledge about the Orient in the Post-Enlightenment period has been "a systematic discourse by which Europe was able to manage--even produce--the Orient politically, sociologically, militarily, ideologically, scientifically, and imaginatively." According to Said, European and American views of the Orient created a reality in which the Oriental was forced to live. Although Said's work deals primarily with discourse about the Arab world, much of his argument has been applied to other regions of "the...

The armies of the Fourth Crusade that left Western Europe at the beginning of the thirteenth century never reached the Holy Land to fight the Infidel; they stopped instead at Byzantium and sacked that capital of eastern Christendom. Much of what we know today of those events comes from contemporary accounts by secular writers; their perspective is balanced by a document written from a monastic point of view and now available for the first time in English.

The Hystoria Constantinopolitana relates the adventures of Martin of Pairis, an abbot of the Cistercian Order who...