Böcker utgivna av UNIV OF WASHINGTON PR

Brings a borderlands perspective to the history of ChinaFrom the eighth to thirteenth centuries along China's rugged southern periphery, trade in tribute articles and an interregional horse market thrived. These ties dramatically affected imperial China's relations with the emerging kingdoms in its borderlands. Local chiefs before the tenth century had considered the control of such contacts an important aspect of their political authority. Rulers and high officials at the Chinese court valued commerce in the region, where rare commodities could be obtained and vassal kingdoms showed less belligerence than did northern ones. Trade routes along this Southwest Silk Road traverse the homelands of numerous non-Han peoples. This book investigates the principalities, chiefdoms, and market nodes that emerged and flourished in the network of routes that passed through what James A. Anderson calls the "Dong world," a collection of Tai-speaking polities in upland valleys. The process of state formation that arose through trade coincided with the differentiation of peoples who were later labeled as distinct ethnicities. Exploration of this formative period at the nexus of the Chinese empire, the Dali kingdom, and the Vietnamese kingdom reveals a nuanced picture of the Chinese province of Yunnan and its southern neighbors preceding Mongol efforts to impose a new administrative order in the region. These communities shared a regional identity and a lively history of interaction well before northern occupiers classified its inhabitants as "national minorities" of China.

How animal conservation became a defense against cultural erasureChina today positions itself as a model of state-led environmentalism. On the country's arid rangelands, grassland conservation policies have targeted pastoralists and their animals, blamed for causing desertification. State environmentalism?in the form of grazing bans, enclosure, and resettlement?has transformed the lives of many ethnic minority herders in China's western borderlands. However, this book shows how such policies have been contested and negotiated on the ground, in the context of the state's intensifying nation-building project. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in Alasha, in the far west of China's Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region, Thomas White describes how ethnic Mongols have foregrounded the local breed of Bactrian camel, mobilizing ideas of heritage and resource conservation to defend pastoralism.In exploring how the greening of the Chinese state affects the entangled lives of humans and animals at the margins of the nation-state, this study is both a political biography of the Bactrian camel and an innovative work of political ecology addressing critical questions of rural livelihoods, conservation, and state power.

"From trilobites near the Idaho border and primitive horses on the Columbia Plateau to giant bird tracks near Bellingham and curious bear-like beasts on the Olympic Peninsula, fossils across Washington State are filled with clues of past life on Earth. With abundant and well-exposed rock layers, the state has fossils dating from Ice Age mammals only 12,000 years old back to marine invertebrates more than 500 million years old. In Spirit Whales and Sloth Tales, paleontologist Elizabeth A. Nesbitt teams up with popular science writer David B. Williams to offer a tour through more than a half billion years of natural history. Following an introduction to key concepts, twenty-four profiles-each featuring a unique plant, animal, or environment-tell stories of individual fossils, many of which are on display in Washington museums. The paleontology of Washington is brought to life with details of the fossils' discovery and extraction, their place in geological time, and the insights they provide into contemporary issues like climate change and species extinction"--

How the city's marginalized communities have historically used sports as a tool for resilience and resistanceTo cities, sports have never been just entertainment. Progressive urbanites across the United States have used athletics to address persistent problems in city life: the fights for racial justice, workers' rights, equality for women and LGBTQ+ city dwellers, and environmental conservation. In Seattle, sports initiatives have powered meaningful reforms, such as popular stadium projects that promoted investments in public housing and mass transit. At the same time, conservative forces also used sports to consolidate their power and mobilize against the civic good. In Heartbreak City Shaun Scott takes the reader through 170 years of Seattle history, chronicling both well-known and long-forgotten events, like the establishment of racially segregated golf courses and neighborhoods in the regressive 1920s and the 1987 Seahawks players' strike that galvanized organized labor. At every step of the journey, he uncovers how sports have both united Seattle in pursuit of triumph and revealed its most profound political divides. Deep archival research and analysis combine in this people's history of a great American city's quest to become even greater-if only it could get out of its own way.Heartbreak City was made possible in part by a grant from 4Culture's Heritage Program.A Michael J. Repass Book

"Seattle was recently dubbed the best bike city in America by Bicycling magazine-but how did this notoriously hilly and rainy city become so inviting to people riding bikes? And what potholes lie ahead for bike advocates in the Emerald City? Tom Fucoloro, a longtime reporter on bike issues in Seattle, blends his reporting with historical research to uncover the story behind Seattle's hard-won bike lanes and trails, exploring how this center of bike culture emerged despite the obstacles of climate, topography, and - most importantly - an entrenched, car-centric urban landscape and culture"--

"The world is well aware of the dramatic rise of markets and consumerism in China's post-Mao era of political and economic reform. By contrast, the Mao period (1949-1976)-rightly framed as a time of scarcity-initially appears to have had little material culture to speak of. But availability of fewer commodities does not mean a lack of material culture. A wide range of materials, objects, and practices comprised the fabric of everyday life in Maoist China, as industries were invented and reinvented at the level of material and products, from bamboo to bricks, and from pickles to wristwatches. People attributed great meaning to material and objects often precisely because they were rare and difficult to obtain. This first volume devoted to material culture of the period explores the paradox of consumption under Chinese Communist Party rule and illustrates how central materiality was to individual and collective desire, social and economic construction of the country, and projections of an imminent socialist utopia in reach of every man and woman, if only they worked hard enough. Chapters focus on materials, how things were produced, how they circulated, and how they were used. Together, they suggest that new understandings of material culture helped to shape the socialist subject, while also calling into question our standard definitions of what Maoist socialism was and how it was experienced"--