Böcker utgivna av Cornell University Press

In Useful Bullshit Neil J. Diamant pulls back the curtain on early constitutional conversations between citizens and officials in the PRC. Scholars have argued that China, like the former USSR, promulgated constitutions to enhance its domestic and international legitimacy by opening up the constitution-making process to ordinary people, and by granting its citizens political and socioeconomic rights. But what did ordinary officials and people say about their constitutions and rights? Did constitutions contribute to state legitimacy? Over the course of four decades, the PRC government encouraged millions of citizens to pose questions about, and suggest revisions to, the draft of a new constitution. Seizing this opportunity, people asked both straightforward questions like "e;what is a state?"e;, but also others that, through implication, harshly criticized the document and the government that sponsored it. They pressed officials to clarify the meaning of words, phrases, and ideas in the constitution, proposing numerous revisions. Despite many considering the document "e;bullshit,"e; successive PRC governments have promulgated it, amending the constitution, debating it at length, and even inaugurating a "e;Constitution Day."e;Drawing upon a wealth of archival sources from the Maoist and reform eras, Diamant deals with all facets of this constitutional discussion, as well as its afterlives in the late '50s, the Cultural Revolution, and the post-Mao era. Useful Bullshit illuminates how the Chinese government understands and makes use of the constitution as a political document, and how a vast array of citizens-police, workers, university students, women, and members of different ethnic and religious groups-have responded.

Remaking the Chinese Empire examines China's development from an empire into a modern state through the lens of Sino-Korean political relations during the Qing period. Incorporating Korea into the historical narrative of the Chinese empire, it demonstrates that the Manchu regime used its relations with Choson Korea to establish, legitimize, and...

In this book, Bonnie Honig rethinks that established relation between politics and political theory. From liberal to communitarian to republican, political theorists of opposing positions often treat political theory less as an exploration of politics...

"Bats of the West Indies synthesizes information concerning the history, structure, distribution, ecology, behavior, and reproduction of sixty-one species of bats currently living in the islands. The book also summarizes the basic biology of bats, human-bat interactions, conservation concerns, and factors affecting the local distribution of these mammals"--

"This book describes the biology and distribution of butterflies of Maine and the Canadian Maritimes (New Brunswick, Nova Scotia, and Prince Edward Island). Included are detailed species profiles (with color photographs, maps, and flight graphics) and chapters summarizing methods of study, biogeographic patterns, conservation concerns, and potential future species occurrences"-

The Stuff of Soldiers uses everyday objects to tell the story of the Great Patriotic War as never before. Brandon Schechter attends to a diverse array of things-from spoons to tanks-to show how a wide array of citizens became soldiers, and how the provisioning of material goods separated soldiers from civilians.Through a fascinating examination...

In The Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere, Jeremy Yellen exposes the history, politics, and intrigue that characterized the era when Japan's "e;total empire"e; met the total war of World War II. He illuminates the ways in which the imperial center and its individual colonies understood the concept of the Sphere, offering two sometimes competing, sometimes complementary, and always intertwined visions-one from Japan, the other from Burma and the Philippines.Yellen argues that, from 1940 to 1945, the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere epitomized two concurrent wars for Asia's future: the first was for a new type of empire in Asia, and the second was a political war, waged by nationalist elites in the colonial capitals of Rangoon and Manila. Exploring Japanese visions for international order in the face of an ever-changing geopolitical situation, The Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere explores wartime Japan's desire to shape and control its imperial future while its colonies attempted to do the same. At Japan's zenith as an imperial power, the Sphere represented a plan for regional domination; by the end of the war, it had been recast as the epitome of cooperative internationalism. In the end, the Sphere could not survive wartime defeat, and Yellen's lucidly written account reveals much about the desires of Japan as an imperial and colonial power, as well as the ways in which the subdued colonies in Burma and the Philippines jockeyed for agency and a say in the future of the region.

When Americans declared independence in 1776, they cited King George III "for quartering large bodies of armed troops among us." In Quarters, John Gilbert McCurdy explores the social and political history behind the charge, offering an authoritative account of the housing of British soldiers in America. Providing new interpretations and...

Are colleges and universities in a period of unprecedented disruption? Is a bachelor's degree still worth the investment? Are the humanities coming to an end? What, exactly, is higher education good for?In For the Common Good, Charles Dorn challenges the rhetoric of America's so-called crisis in higher education by investigating two centuries...

"The End of Victory tells the history of the enigmatic Net Evaluation Subcommittee of the National Security Council. The NESC studied the gravest potential failure of American strategy in the 1950s and '60s: a surprise Soviet nuclear attack. Its annual reports and specialized studies quantified the risks that Presidents Eisenhower and Kennedy faced in a decade rife with crises, from Berlin to Cuba. The detailed work of the NESC, whose very existence was secret until the mid-1980s, has only been available to researchers in any detail since 2014. Kaplan's is the first study of the NESC as a body, documenting its value to Cold War history and strategy"--

"A child's suicide pitches you into a hellish place of fragmentary images, the deepest depression imaginable, efforts to destroy yourself, and an almost complete break with what's happening in the world around you. That was my experience. I wish it upon no one."    The essays of The Loneliest Places began as a chronicle of Rachel Dickinson's life after her son's suicide. The pieces became much more. Dickinson writes the unimaginable and terrifying facts of heartbreaking loss. In The Loneliest Places she tells stories from her months on the run, fleeing her grief and herself, as she escapes to Iceland and the Falkland Islands¿as far as possible from the memories of her dead son, Jack. She frankly relates the paralyzing emotion that sometimes left her trapped in her home, confined to a single chair, helplessly isolated.   The tales from these years are bleak and Dickinson's journey home, back to her changed self and fractured family, is lonely. Conjuring Emily Dickinson, however, she describes how hope was sighted, allowed to perch, and then, remarkably, made actual.