The book shows how the kings of the Western Zhou period used ritual to create and hold onto their power.

"With the defeat of the Shang, the Zhou royal house positioned itself at the ideological center of a network held together by personal relationships with the early kings. To maintain this central position in the new post-Shang hierarchy, and to pursue their project of state-building through delegation of authority, the Zhou kings drew on one of their primary cultural advantages: their familiarity with Shang-style ancestral ritual. In doing so, the royal family faced the challenge of retooling the well-established Shang ritual system, centered on a supreme lineage tracing its ancestry back more than twenty generations, to meet the needs of a recently forged coalition of elite populations. The following analysis explores the political details of this Western Zhou adaptation of Shang ancestral ritual. Through a close look at the records of individual ritual techniques, it shows that royal ancestral ceremonies reinforced the king's role as arbiter of prestige in Zhou elite society and inculcated principles of Zhou social organization. High-ranking elites attended these ceremonies, took part in them, and duplicated them within their own domains, in some cases at the king's express recommendation. They cast inscribed bronzes commemorating their attendance and used them in their own ancestral cults and burial practices, appropriating the memories of these ceremonies as tools for building personal and lineage identities"--

The Earth and Its Peoples is a truly global text that employs a fundamental theme--the interaction of human beings and the environment--as a point of comparison for different times, places, and societies. Special emphasis is given to technology and how technological development underlies all human activity. The text has been rewritten to improve coverage of the early Americas, Russia, the Enlightenment, the Renaissance, and the Industrial Revolution.

"Bibliography of publications based upon collections made with the support of the Swedish China research committee, by Fr. E. Åhlander": Bulletin no. 1, p. 185-191.

Vols. for 1969- include ACTFL annual bibliography of books and articles on pedagogy in foreign languages 1969-