Böcker utgivna av Academic Studies Press

The Limits of Reform examines the institutional, social, and cultural foundations of bureaucratic power and authority in Imperial Russia using the deeply rooted and wide ranging Ministry of Internal Affairs as example. The author develops the concept of "Ministerial Power" to explain the enduring and highly personalized mode of authority in Russian history. This analysis and concept have implications for understanding both Soviet and post-Soviet governmental institutions.

How St. Petersburg Learned to Study Itself: The Russian Idea of Kraevedenie considers the origins and evolutions of kraevedenie, looking specifically at the role that movements and institutions that emerged in early twentieth-century St. Petersburg played in the formation of this discipline. Based on extensive work in archives in St. Petersburg, it looks at the historical preservation movement that was spearheaded by participants in the World of Art circle and contributors to the journal Starye gody. It considers the pedagogical excursion movement and specifically the influence of Ivans Grevs and Nikolai Antsiferov. It also discusses the operations and role of the Central Bureau of Kraevedenie in the 1920s.The original English-language edition of this book (Penn State University Press, 2006) received both the South Central MLA book award and the Nikolai Antsiferov Prize for the best work on St. Petersburg by a foreign author.

While acknowledging Dostoevsky's personal commitment to the Russian Orthodox faith, Jones argues that it is possible to understand his fictional world only in terms of the interplay of a wide variety of religious experiences and outlooks, including affirmations of faith and expressions of radical doubt and unbelief, and a constant questioning of one by the other. In their neglect of its outward expressions, Dostoevsky's novels seem to acknowledge that the Orthodox tradition has to die in order to be reborn in the light of the image of Christ and that, to use his own expression, the final 'hosanna' must pass through a 'furnace of doubt'.

How did Gorbachev and Yeltsin get away with transforming and replacing the Soviet system and its foreign relations? Why did they act as they did in pushing for such radical changes? And how will history evaluate their accomplishments? In this unique and original study, George W. Breslauer compares and evaluates the leadership strategies adopted by Gorbachev and Yeltsin at each stage of their administrations: political rise, political ascendancy, and political decline. He demonstrates how these men used the power of ideas to mobilize support for their policies, to seize the initiative from political rivals, and to mold their images as effective problem solvers, indispensable politicians, and symbols of national unity and élan. Gorbachev and Yeltsin as Leaders also compares these men with Khrushchev and Brezhnev, yielding new insight into the nature of Soviet and post-Soviet politics and into the dynamics of "transformational" leadership more generally. The book is an important contribution to the analysis and evaluation of political leadership. It is exceptionally well written and accessible to the nonspecialist.

Crisis, War, and the Holocaust in Lithuania examines the Holocaust with a new perspective based on previously inaccessible sources. The book relates the history of the crises which preceded the Shoah, describes in detail the process of destruction, and concludes by addressing Lithuanian society's struggles to confront the legacy of unprecedented violence.

Over one million refugees left Russia at the Bolshevik Revolution. The pain of losing one's homeland may fade, but the psyche is slow to heal. The Nansen Factor shines a light on the lives of some of these refugees.

Year 2023 marked 120 years of the Lazarus Jewish Hospital in Lviv (Lwów/Lemberg). This richly illustrated book is a tribute to its place in the once-vibrant Jewish community of the city and in the society at large during the period 1903-1939. Visionaries from Lviv presents the hospital's history and its fascinating architecture, its doctors, and its founder, a prominent local Jewish philanthropist Maurycy Lazarus, with the background of the Jewish life in Lviv. The volume also details the history of medicine and medical education in Habsburg Galicia prior to the hospital's founding, Jewish access to the medical profession, and the impact of Jewish doctors on the path to modernity. It also shows the struggle of women to become doctors. A moving and timely book with contributions from leading historians, scholars, and medical professionals, Visionaries from Lviv is an ode to the once thriving Jewish community in Lviv and a testament to how one person's dream and commitment can impact the lives of so many. This publication was made possible with support from Furthermore: a program of the J. M. Kaplan Fund and Gesher Galicia.

Cities Surround the Countryside: Urban Aesthetics in Postsocialist China analyzes urban aesthetics in the Peoples Republic of China at the turn of the 21st century (1990-2010). Applying empirical field research, historical frameworks, and critical theory to analysis of urban fiction, cinema, art, architecture, and urban planning, the book explores how new forms of urban identity manifest in private lifestyles, local cultures, civic activism, narrative ethics, and urban governance. Cities is unique in its sustained analysis of cultural aesthetics in relation to the built environment and in its contextualization of urban aesthetics within broader economic and intellectual trends.

From Victory to Peace: Russian Diplomacy After Napoleon explores how Russia's diplomats understood European security as they worked to implement the edifice of pacification and peace constructed in 1814, 1815, and 1818. In response to developments across Europe and in Spanish America, Emperor Alexander I's hopes for peace, pragmatic adaptability, and commitment to act in concert with the other great powers came fully into focus. Based on sources of Russian provenance, the book challenges characterizations of Alexander's behavior as erratic and his foreign policy as heavy-handed and expansionist. Indeed, as historians assimilate the Russian perspective on European order (as well as the perspectives of other less well-studied countries), they encounter a multifaceted Restoration built upon practices of enlightened reformism and direct experience of revolution and war.

What should we make of claims by members of other groups to have moralities different from our own? Human Rights in Chinese Thought gives an extended answer to this question in the first study of its kind. It integrates a full account of the development of Chinese rights discourse with philosophical consideration of how various communities should respond to contemporary Chinese claims about the uniqueness of their human rights concepts. The book elaborates a plausible kind of moral pluralism and demonstrates that Chinese ideas of human rights do indeed have distinctive characteristics, but it nonetheless argues for the importance and promise of cross-cultural moral engagement.

From the late nineteenth century to the eve of World War II, America's experts on Russia watched as Russia and the Soviet Union embarked on a course of rapid industrialization. Captivated by the idea of modernization, diplomats, journalists, and scholars across the political spectrum rationalized the enormous human cost of this path to progress. In a fascinating examination of this crucial era, David Engerman underscores the key role economic development played in America's understanding of Russia and explores its profound effects on U.S. policy.American intellectuals from George Kennan to Samuel Harper to Calvin Hoover understood Russian events in terms of national character. Many of them used stereotypes of Russian passivity, backwardness, and fatalism to explain the need for-and the costs of-Soviet economic development. These costs included devastating famines that left millions starving while the government still exported grain.This book is a stellar example of the new international history that seamlessly blends cultural and intellectual currents with policymaking and foreign relations. It offers valuable insights into the role of cultural differences and the shaping of economic policy for developing nations even today.

Taking aim at the conventional narrative that standard, national languages transform 'peasants' into citizens, Gina Anne Tam centers the history of the Chinese nation and national identity on fangyan - languages like Shanghainese, Cantonese, and dozens of others that are categorically different from the Chinese national language, Mandarin. She traces how, on the one hand, linguists, policy-makers, bureaucrats and workaday educators framed fangyan as non-standard 'variants' of the Chinese language, subsidiary in symbolic importance to standard Mandarin. She simultaneously highlights, on the other hand, the folksong collectors, playwrights, hip-hop artists and popular protestors who argued that fangyan were more authentic and representative of China's national culture and its history. From the late Qing through the height of the Maoist period, these intertwined visions of the Chinese nation - one spoken in one voice, one spoken in many - interacted and shaped one another, and in the process, shaped the basis for national identity itself.

In Erik Mueggler's powerful and imaginative ethnography, an Indigenous community in the mountains of Southwest China struggles to find its place at the margins of a nation-state. Here, people describe the period that began with the Great Leap Famine of 1958-1960 and continued through the 1990s as the "age of wild ghosts." Their stories of this age converged on a dream of community-a bad dream, embodied in the life, death, and spectral reawakening of a local political and ritual system that expired violently under the Maoist regime. Displaying a sensitive understanding of both Chinese and the Tibeto-Burman language of this community, Mueggler explores memories of this institution, including of the rituals and poetics that once surrounded it and the bitter conflicts that came to haunt it. To exorcise "wild ghosts," he shows, is nothing less than to re-imagine the state and its power, to trace the responsibility for violence to its morally ambiguous origins, and to articulate demands for justice and longings for reconciliation.

The Tiananmen protests and Beijing massacre of 1989 were a major turning point in recent Chinese history. In this new analysis of 1989, Jeremy Brown tells the vivid stories of participants and victims, exploring the nationwide scope of the democracy movement and the brutal crackdown that crushed it. At each critical juncture in the spring of 1989, demonstrators and decision makers agonized over difficult choices and saw how events could have unfolded differently. The alternative paths that participants imagined confirm that bloodshed was neither inevitable nor necessary. Using a wide range of previously untapped sources and examining how ordinary citizens throughout China experienced the crackdown after the massacre, this ambitious social history sheds fresh light on events that continue to reverberate in China to this day.

The Blue Lagoon, Anthology of Modern Russian Poetry, was published in nine volumes in the United States from 1980 till 1986. For many years it remained one of the most important sources on Russian unofficial poetry of the Soviet period. It is also the biggest anthology of Russian poetry ever. Today, mostly in online version, it is a living mirror of the Soviet era and its chronicler - poet and publisher Konstantin Kuzminsky (1940-2015).

Anticipating some Soviet Union developments, Evgenii Zamyatsin's We (1920) is a futuristic dystopic novel in which D-503, builder of the first rocket ship, extols the glories of the Single State and discovers another way of life beyond his highly controlled society. From the newer field of biopoetics, which applies evolutionary psychology to art instead of emphasizing the social construction of human behavior and consciousness, Cooke (Texas A&M U.) explores themes in the novel including workforce mechanization, the symbolic roles of food-sharing, eugenics, and writing as subversion. Comparisons are made with other dystopian literature (e.g. Brave New World ), and novels by Russian authors including Solzhenitsyn and Tolstoy.

Geographical Imagination is an intellectual biography of Ishikawa Sanshirō (1876-1956), a Japanese anarchist active during the first half of the 20th century and a staunch opponent of any form of authoritarianism throughout his life. The book traces his travels, encounters, and ideological engagements, as he opposed war with Russia in the early 1900s, spent several years of self-imposed exile in France and Belgium in the 1910s, and explored European ideas - from anarchism and geographical thought to anti-Darwinism and ecological living. Ishikawa's life and writings bear testimony to Japan's undercurrent of political dissent and transnational revolutionary connections during the modern period.

In the United States, antisemitism has once again risen, and is spread in all our major institutions and political and cultural venues. In a series of essays by leading scholars, this work provides a detailed analysis of contemporary antisemitism and examines its origins, development, and alarming implications for the future.

This book contains a collection of eight annotated translations of responsa, alongside the original Hebrew texts, focusing on the post-expulsion Spanish-Portuguese communities of the sixteenth to seventeenth centuries. Topics include excommunication in Amsterdam, ʻagunot, inheritance rights of a converso son, obligatory contracts and breach of agreement, heresy and humanist scholarship, informing on someone to the Venetian Inquisition, and more.

In the six essays of this book, Ksana Blank examines affinities among works of nineteenth and twentieth-century Russian literature and their connections to the visual arts and music. Blank demonstrates that the borders of authorial creativity are not stable and absolute, that talented artists often transcend the classifications and paradigms established by critics. Featured in the volume are works by Alexander Pushkin, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Leo Tolstoy, Vladimir Nabokov, Daniil Kharms, Kazimir Malevich, Mstislav Dobuzhinsky, and Dmitri Shostakovich.

Taming Oblivion examines the cultural construction of senility in Japan and the moral implications of dependent behavior for older Japanese. While the biomedical construction of senility-as-pathology has become increasingly the norm in North America, in Japan a folk category of senility exists known as boke. Although symptomatically and conceptually overlapping with Alzheimer's disease and other forms of senile dementia, boke is distinguished from unambiguously pathological conditions. Rather than being viewed as a disease, boke is seen as an illness over which people have some degree of control. John Traphagan's ethnographic study of older Japanese explores their experiences as they contemplate and attempt to prevent or delay the boke condition.

This book provides a thorough examination of how both Marina Tsvetaeva and Boris Pasternak perceived Rainer Maria Rilke's poetic persona and oeuvre in similar ways, and how, in their perception of Rilke's role as that of the paradigmatic poet, they had drawn on the specifically Russian poetic paradigm, i.e., the image of Pushkin in the context of Russian literature of the Silver Age. At the same time, both poets' scrutiny of the sublime, the mundane, and the tragic side of practicing poetic craft in the Soviet Union, as in the case of Pasternak, and in exile, as in Tsvetaeva's case, generates the discourse of "empathic attunement." By applying "empathic" discourse towards Rilke, both poets' anxieties about their future, and that of Russian poetry in general, come to the fore.

Religion in China survived the most radical suppression in the human history-a total ban of any religion during the Cultural Revolution. All churches, temples, and mosques were closed down, converted for secular uses, or turned into museums for the purpose of atheist education. Since the 1970s, however, religion has thrived even though China remains under Communist rule. Christianity ranks among the fastest-growing religions throughout the vast land while many Buddhist and Daoist temples have been restored. The Communist authorities have carried out waves of atheist propaganda, anti-superstition campaigns, and severe crackdowns on Christian churches and new religious movements. How do we explain the resilience and vitality of religion in modernizing China? How did religion survive the eradication measures in the 1950s to 1970s? How have various religious groups managed to revive despite strict regulations? Why have some religions grown fast? Why have some forms of spirituality gone through dramatic turns? This book provides a comprehensive overview of the religious change in China under ¿ommunist rule, and it also offers a set of theoretical tools for studying religious vitality in modernizing societies.

Dostoevsky and the Riddle of the Self charts a unifying path through Dostoevsky's artistic journey to solve the "mystery" of the human being. Starting from the unusual forms of intimacy shown by characters seeking to lose themselves within larger collective selves, Yuri Corrigan approaches the fictional works as a continuous experimental canvas on which Dostoevsky explored the problem of selfhood through recurring symbolic and narrative paradigms. Presenting new readings of such works as The Idiot, Demons, and The Brothers Karamazov, Corrigan tells the story of Dostoevsky's career-long journey to overcome the pathology of collectivism by discovering a passage into the wounded, embattled, forbidding, revelatory landscape of the psyche