Sowing Empire


Book Description

In an ambitious work of wide-ranging literary, visual, and historical allusion, Jill H.Casid examines how landscaping functioned in an imperial mode that defined and remade the "heartlands" of nations as well as the contact zones and colonial peripheries in the West and East Indies. Revealing the colonial landscape as far more than an agricultural system - as a means of regulating national, sexual, and gender identities - Casid also traces how the circulation of plants and hybridity influenced agriculture and landscaping on European soil and how colonial contacts materially shaped what we take as "European."




Resurrecting Empire


Book Description

Begun as the United States moved its armed forces into Iraq, Rashid Khalidi's powerful and thoughtful new book examines the record of Western involvement in the region and analyzes the likely outcome of our most recent Middle East incursions. Drawing on his encyclopedic knowledge of the political and cultural history of the entire region as well as interviews and documents, Khalidi paints a chilling scenario of our present situation and yet offers a tangible alternative that can help us find the path to peace rather than Empire. We all know that those who refuse to learn from history are doomed to repeat it. Sadly, as Khalidi reveals with clarity and surety, America's leaders seem blindly committed to an ahistorical path of conflict, occupation, and colonial rule. Our current policies ignore rather than incorporate the lessons of experience. American troops in Iraq have seen first hand the consequences of U.S. led "democratization" in the region. The Israeli/Palestinian conflict seems intractable, and U.S. efforts in recent years have only inflamed the situation. The footprints America follows have led us into the same quagmire that swallowed our European forerunners. Peace and prosperity for the region are nowhere in sight. This cogent and highly accessible book provides the historical and cultural perspective so vital to understanding our present situation and to finding and pursuing a more effective and just foreign policy.




Menace to Empire


Book Description

"Menace to Empire is a profoundly original and ambitious book, a history of race and empire that traces both the colonial violence and the anticolonial rage that the United States spread across the Pacific between the Philippine-American War and World War II. Author Moon-Ho Jung argues that the US national security state as we know it was born out of attempts to repress and silence colonized subjects, from the Philippines and Hawai'i to California and beyond, whose anticolonial aspirations challenged US claims to sovereignty. Jung examines how the contradictions of race, nation, and empire generated waves of revolutionary movements spanning the Pacific--anticolonial, antiracist, and labor movements that exposed and confronted the US empire. In response, the US state closely monitored and brutally suppressed those movements by racializing particular politics and distinct communities as seditious, exaggerating fears of pan-Asian solidarities and sowing anti-Asian racism under the guise of national security. Menace to Empire transforms familiar themes in American history to highlight the critical role of colonial violence in the formation of radical movements and the antiradical origins of anti-Asian racism. Radicalized by their opposition to the US empire and racialized as threats to US security, peoples in and from Asia pursued a revolutionary politics that gave rise to the national security state--the heart and soul of the US empire ever since"--Provided by publisher.




The Sowing


Book Description

After Remy Alexander's older sister is murdered in a cold-blooded massacre, her family discovers the Okarian Sector is hiding the truth behind the attack. Remy and her parents flee the Sector to join the clandestine Resistance movement. Now, three years later, Remy and her friends are convinced they've found a clue that can help them unravel the mystery behind the murders and expose the secrets behind the Sector's use of genetically modified food. But back home in the Sector, Valerian Orlean, the boy Remy once thought she loved, is put in charge of hunting and destroying the Resistance. Even as Vale strives to live up to his parent's expectations, he is haunted by the memory of his friendship with Remy and is determined to find out why she disappeared. As Remy seeks justice for her sister and Vale seeks to protect the Sector and everything he believes in, the two are set on a collision course that could bring everyone together-or tear everything apart. Writing as K. Makansi, the mother-daughter writing team of Kristina, Amira, and Elena Makansi immerses readers in the post-apocalyptic world of the Okarian Sector where romance, enduring friendships, edge-of-your-seat action, and heart-wrenching betrayal will decide the fate of a nation.




The Last Empire


Book Description

The New York Times bestselling author of The Gates of Europe offers “a stirring account of an extraordinary moment” in Russian history (Wall Street Journal) On Christmas Day, 1991, President George H. W. Bush addressed the nation to declare an American victory in the Cold War: earlier that day Mikhail Gorbachev had resigned as the first and last Soviet president. The enshrining of that narrative, one in which the end of the Cold War was linked to the disintegration of the Soviet Union and the triumph of democratic values over communism, took center stage in American public discourse immediately after Bush's speech and has persisted for decades -- with disastrous consequences for American standing in the world. As prize-winning historian Serhii Plokhy reveals in The Last Empire, the collapse of the Soviet Union was anything but the handiwork of the United States. Bush, in fact, was firmly committed to supporting Gorbachev as he attempted to hold together the USSR in the face of growing independence movements in its republics. Drawing on recently declassified documents and original interviews with key participants, Plokhy presents a bold new interpretation of the Soviet Union's final months, providing invaluable insight into the origins of the current Russian-Ukrainian conflict and the outset of the most dangerous crisis in East-West relations since the end of the Cold War. Winner of the Lionel Gelber Prize Winner of the Pushkin House Russian Book Prize Choice Outstanding Academic Title BBC History Magazine Best History Book of the Year




Milk Plant Monthly


Book Description




Farm Life;


Book Description




Sowing Stories Deep in the Soul


Book Description

Some adolescent women struggle to maintain positive self-identity, resilience, and personalized faith development on their journey toward adulthood. It is a contemporary crisis recognized by many, including ministry leaders of faith communities. In today’s fast-paced digital culture, concerns addressing challenges facing adolescent women are evident in research literature. To strengthen their spiritual well-being, emphasis is placed on spiritual formation practices that enhance faith, hope, and personal relationships amid social, peer, and media pressures pulling them into negative, detrimental, and dysfunctional lifestyles. Empirical research reveals a need to transform negative images and self-destruction utilizing stories of holistic well-being. Sowing Stories Deep in the Soul: Biblical Storytelling with Adolescent Women highlights biblical women touched by the holistic healing ministry of Jesus with deep soul-stirring experiences of God’s compassionate love. It meets the need as a spiritual formation ministry model focused on creativity, engaging study, internalized story learning, positive life connections, and performing biblical stories by heart. These expressive aspects form the ancient oral character of Bible stories internalized and voiced in repeated performances for compelling impact and action. Included are replicable results of action research using this model with adolescent women to encourage maintaining Christ-centered lives.




Spaces of Global Knowledge


Book Description

’Global’ knowledge was constructed, communicated and contested during the long nineteenth century in numerous ways and places. This book focuses on the life-geographies, material practices and varied contributions to knowledge, be they medical or botanical, cartographic or cultural, of actors whose lives crisscrossed an increasingly connected world. Integrating detailed archival research with broader thematic and conceptual reflection, the individual case studies use local specificity to shed light on global structures and processes, revealing the latter to be lived and experienced phenomena rather than abstract historiographical categories. This volume makes an original and compelling contribution to a growing body of scholarship on the global history of knowledge. Given its wide geographic, disciplinary and thematic range this book will appeal to a broad readership including historical geographers and specialists in history of science and medicine, imperial history, museum studies, and book history.




Defoe’s Writings and Manliness


Book Description

Defoe's Writings and Manliness is a timely intervention in Defoe studies and in the study of masculinity in eighteenth-century literature more generally. Arguing that Defoe's writings insistently returned to the issues of manliness and its contrary, effeminacy, this book reveals how he drew upon a complex and diverse range of discourses through which masculinity was discussed in the period. It is for this reason that this book crosses over and moves between modern paradigms for the analysis of eighteenth-century masculinity to assess Defoe's men. A combination of Defoe's clarity of vision, a spirit of contrariness and a streak of moral didacticism resulted in an idiosyncratic and restless testing of the forces surrounding his period's ideas of manliness. Defoe's men are men, but they are never unproblematically so: they display a contrariness which indicates that a failure of manliness is never very far away.