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This work examines the daily lives of Japan’s very poor—the kasō shakai or underclass—during the last half of the Meiji era (1868-1912). Focusing on urban slums (hinminkutsu), it attempts to understand how poor people themselves experienced life. After examining the dominant popular views of hinmin or poor people in this era as a baseline, the author looks at what brought masses of hinmin to the cities, where they lived, and what work they did: everything from pulling rickshaws to making textiles, from carrying night soil to providing sex. It looks too at the daily challenges of stretching budgets, grappling with educational issues for children, and preparing meals. One chapter concentrates on the major problems, such as illness and disasters, that made the poverty-stricken life especially difficult, while another examines the endless ways in which the very poor acted as agents, filling life not just with hope but with activism and celebration in the here and now. Final, comparative chapters take up the nature of rural poverty and the lives of poor Japanese immigrants in Hawai’i’s sugar plantations as a way of understanding what was unique about urban poverty. The work contends that despite massive difficulties, the hinmin attacked life as intelligent agents, experiencing a range of life experiences similar to those that typified the more affluent classes.

Light in the Queen’s Garden chronicles the life of Ida Pope, a transformational type of leader in any era, who was handpicked to establish the Kamehameha School for Girls. This institution was established in 1894 by the estate of Princess Pauahi, the last of the royal Kamehameha line, and dedicated to the education of girls of Hawaiian ancestry. When twenty-eight-year-old Ida left Ohio to accept a “temporary” teaching assignment in Honolulu, she couldn’t have imagined it would become a lifelong career of service to Hawaiian women. Nor could she have envisioned she would become closely involved in the greatest political turmoil the Hawaiians had ever experienced. Ida Pope’s firsthand account of the years that brought her pupils into womanhood during the annexation of their kingdom tells an important story about the Hawaiians and a rapidly changing world. As she worked with forces like Queen Liliuokalani and Charles Bishop, Ida in turn became a force shaping society for future generations of Hawaiian women.

Monastery, Monument, Museum examines cultural sites, artifacts, and institutions of Thailand as both products and vehicles of cultural memory. From rock caves to reliquaries, from cultic images to temple murals, from museums and modern monuments to contemporary artworks, cultural sites and artifacts are considered in relation to the transmission of religious beliefs and political ideologies, as well as manual and intellectual knowledge, throughout thelongue durée of Thailand’s cultural history. Sequenced by and large chronologically along a period of time spanning the eleventh century through to the start of the twenty-first, the eight chapters in this book are grouped into three sections that surface distinct themes and analytical concerns: devotional art in Part I, museology and art history in Part II, and political art in Part III. The chapters can even be read as self-contained essays, each supplied with extensive bibliographic references.By examining the interplay between cultural sites and artifacts, their popular and scholarly appreciation, and the institutional configuration of a cultural legacy, Monastery, Monument, Museum makes a contribution to the literature on memory studies. A second area of scholarship this book engages is the art history of Thailand by shifting focus from the chronological and stylistic analysis of artifacts to their social life—and afterlife. Monastery, Monument, Museum brings together in one volume a millennium of art and cultural history of Thailand. Its novel analysis and thought-provoking re-interpretation of a variety of artifacts and source materials will be of interest to both the specialist and the general reader.

Beginning in 1897 the French state monopolized the production and sale of rice liquor in Indochina. The result was one of the colonial era’s defining institutions, with French-owned factories churning out tasteless ethanol and the state’s largest civilian branch, the Department of Customs and Monopolies, using draconian means to encourage consumption and stamp out illegal competition. The monopoly not only failed to generate appreciable net revenue for the state, but also it placed millions of Indochinese in a stance of resistance to its rule as they continued to make and drink liquor as they had for generations. The monopoly was the product of advances in microbiology, the consolidation of the distilling industry, and the growth of the fiscal state worldwide. Yet it was also shaped by Indochina’s unique geographies, histories, and personalities. By exploring alcohol’s central role in the making of colonial Indochina, Imperial Intoxication illuminates the contradictory mix of modern and archaic, power and impotence, civil bureaucracy and military occupation that characterized colonial rule. It highlights the role Indochinese played in shaping the monopoly, whether as illegal distillers or the agents sent to arrest them. And it links long-ago stories of rebellion to global processes that continue to play out today.

Focusing on a diverse cast of characters and/or depraved actions polemicized by writers from the Spring and Autumn period (771-476 B.C.E.) through the Song dynasty (960-1279 C.E.), this volume places center stage transgressive individuals and groups traditionally demonized and marginalized by Confucian annalists and largely shunned by modern scholars. This interdisciplinary collection demonstrates that many of these so-called miscreants—treacherous regicides, impious monks, cutthroat underlings, ill-bred offspring, depraved poet-literati, and disloyal officials—were deemed so not because of a set of immutable social and religious norms, but by decisions and circumstances influenced by personal taste, contradictory value systems, and negotiations of political and social power.

This book explores international relations, migration, diaspora, trade, war, conquest, and historical memory within and across the Asia-Pacific region from the late fourteenth to the twenty-first centuries. Its fifteen chapters are organized by four sections focusing on China and the early modern world, circuits of migration and trade, racism and imperialism, and the significance of Pacific islands. The main temporal focus is on the modern period since the mid-nineteenth century, as well as on the crucial influence exerted by the United States on the Asia-Pacific region during this time. While diplomatic and economic relations are addressed, the chapters are especially concerned with the history from the “bottom up,” including attention to social relations and processes, individual and group agency, and collective memory. The book provides a view of US history from the perspective of the Asia-Pacific region, revealing a vision that is not centered on the narrative of the nation’s movement from East to West. The view from the Pacific Ocean provides a better understanding of the relevance of the past for today’s Pacific world in which the US has become more tightly integrated than ever with the Asia-Pacific region.

This volume responds to provocations that Jerry Bentley tendered in his scholarship and through his professional activities. The collection interrogates the institutional settings, disciplinary proclivities, methodological choices, and diverse source bases of world history research and teaching. Several essays in the book address the ways in which present-day concerns influence historical research on local and global scales. Other essays pay particular attention to the production and circulation of knowledge across regional, temporal, and class boundaries, as well as between the academy and the wider public. The book makes a claim for the continued centrality of globally informed and globally focused approaches to historical inquiry. As such, it seeks to continue the conversations that Jerry Bentley carried on through his scholarship, teaching, editing the Journal of World History, participating in many public forums, and contributing to public discussions about the place of history in understanding today’s global integration.

In 1960, South Korean students staged a major series of demonstrations against their government’s abuses of power. Known as the April 19^th Revolution, the movement culminated in the resignation of authoritarian president Syngman Rhee. This book explores media and ideological texts of the post-Korean War years to advance a cultural explanation of that seminal event. It focuses on gendered discourse and ideology that positioned youths as the hope, exemplars, and representatives of the postcolonial nation. Intellectuals and ideologues urged youths to contribute to nation building by enacting patriotic virtues in the everyday. Students also learned about anticolonial resistance as a way to cultivate their nation-centered probity for the postcolonial era. With its emphasis on upstanding youth action, patriotic education of the 1950s ironically prepared students to engage in antigovernment protest on behalf of the nation in April 19^th. Not long after that landmark event, however, Park Chung Hee’s coup of May 16, 1961 effected a quick return to authoritarian rule. The Park regime refigured the emphasis on everyday patriotism in order to mobilize men and women for its controversial program of rapid and uneven economic development. Conversely, memories of April 19^th formed the basis of South Korea’s student-driven democratization (1964-1987).

A study of Korea’s first significant encounter with Western civilization, this work analyzes how Koreans reacted to Catholicism imported from China at the end of the 18^th century. It explores the reason most Koreans, especially Confucian scholars and government officials, reacted negatively to Catholic ideas and practices, going so far as to launch an official persecution of Catholics that cost thousands of lives. To render visible the philosophical background to the anti-Catholic movement, this work includes a complete translation of an anti-Catholic essay written before the persecution began. However, it also examines those Koreans, many of whom were also Confucian scholars, who adopted Catholic beliefs and practices even before there were missionaries on the Korean peninsula. To aid in that investigation, it includes an annotated translation of the Silk Letter of Hwang Sayŏng, a first-person account of the persecution of 1801 relating why some Koreans became Catholics, why some later apostatized, and why others remained faithful to their new faith through torture and execution. In addition, it includes a discussion of Korea attitudes toward their nation and its place in the international order before the emergence of modern nationalism.

When the kingdom of Pagan—representing the “classical state” and “golden age” of Myanmar—declined politically by the early fourteenth century, Upper Myanmar reconstituted itself into three smaller centers of power, each controlled by a minister of the old court, while Lower Myanmar, finally freed from Upper Myanmar’s hegemony, began the process of state formation for the first time. This transitional situation continued for the next half century until two new kingdoms emerged. In Upper Myanmar, it was the First Ava Dynasty and Kingdom in 1364 and in Lower Myanmar, the First Pegu Dynasty and Kingdom in 1349. BoThattained their pinnacles by the fifteenth century, and both had declined before the first half of the sixteenth century was over. That period of nearly 200 years is the only gap left in the mainstream historiography of Myanmar, which this book seeks to fill, by reconstructing the origins, development, and decline of each kingdom separately, and then examining the impact of that history on their relationship. The study shows that whereas in-land agrarian Ava continued the classical tradition of Pagan, maritime commercial Pegu was an entirely new kingdom, the first in Lower Myanmar. The situation generated a symbiotic and dualistic geo-political “upstream-downstream” relationship between the two kingdoms that became, thereafter, a recurring historical pattern until today, currently represented by in-land Naypyidaw and “coastal” Yangon.