This book traces the progression of cosmopolitanism from the private experience of a group of artists and intellectuals who lived and worked in Boston between 1865 and 1915 to finished works of monumental art that shaped public space.

Beginning with the first Japanese and Americans to make contact in the early 1800s, Michael Auslin traces a unique cultural relationship. He focuses on organizations devoted to cultural exchange, such as the American Friends’ Association in Tokyo and the Japan Society of New York, as well as key individuals who promoted mutual understanding.

Intimate Friends & Brilliant Minds from Bygone New York On Sunday evenings from 1850 to 1871, the poets Alice and Phoebe Cary host New Yorks choicest, most cosmopolitan literary salon--the first American bluestocking of its kind. The character-driven plot follows the lives of the energetic sisters in their rise to success. It is a portrait of intellectual, independent women, i.e. Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Mary Louise Booth, Fanny Fern and others, who challenge laws and mindsets, breaking the glass ceiling of their day. Their intimate story parallels the historic deeds and events involving not only the women, but their extraordinary group of close men friends, including Horace Greeley, P.T. Barnum, Bayard Taylor, and John Greenleaf Whittier. Horace Greeley called Phoebe the wittiest woman in America, and Edgar Allan Poe described Alices poem, Pictures of Memory, one of the most musically perfect lyrics in the English language. Before, during, and after the Civil War, abolition, suffrage, religion, politics, and social reform are heated issues. There is adventure, discovery, and financial chaos. In the ambiance of Alice and Phoebes cozy home on 20th Street, philosophy, politics, and literature mingle with fortune, rank, and wit. America comes into its own in literature and New York takes on world prominence.

Levi Strauss, A.L. Gump, Yehudi Menuhin, Gertrude Stein, Adolph Sutro, Congresswoman Florence Prag Kahn--Jewish people have been so enmeshed in life in and around San Francisco that their story is a chronicle of the metropolis itself. Since the Gold Rush, Bay Area Jews have countered stereotypes, working as farmers and miners, boxers and mountaineers. They were Gold Rush pioneers, Gilded Age tycoons, and Progressive Era reformers. Told through an astonishing range of characters and events, Cosmopolitans illuminates many aspects of Jewish life in the area: the high profile of Jewish women, extraordinary achievements in the business world, the cultural creativity of the second generation, the bitter debate about the proper response to the Holocaust and Zionism, and much more. Focusing in rich detail on the first hundred years after the Gold Rush, the book also takes the story up to the present day, demonstrating how unusually strong affinities for the arts and for the struggle for social justice have characterized this community even as it has changed over time. Cosmopolitans, set in the uncommonly diverse Bay Area, is a truly unique chapter of the Jewish experience in America.

A stunningly original look at the forgotten Jewish political roots of contemporary international human rights, told through the moving stories of five key activists The year 2018 marks the seventieth anniversary of two momentous events in twentieth-century history: the birth of the State of Israel and the creation of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Both remain tied together in the ongoing debates about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, global antisemitism, and American foreign policy. Yet the surprising connections between Zionism and the origins of international human rights are completely unknown today. In this riveting account, James Loeffler explores this controversial history through the stories of five remarkable Jewish founders of international human rights, following them from the prewar shtetls of eastern Europe to the postwar United Nations, a journey that includes the Nuremberg and Eichmann trials, the founding of Amnesty International, and the UN resolution of 1975 labeling Zionism as racism. The result is a book that challenges long-held assumptions about the history of human rights and offers a startlingly new perspective on the roots of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

“One of our most important books on globalization.” —Steve O’Keefe, New York Journal of Books The enormous scope of the Internet can lead us to assume that as the online community grows, our world grows smaller and more cosmopolitan. In Digital Cosmopolitans, Ethan Zuckerman explains why the technological ability to communicate with someone does not guarantee human interaction or the healthy exchange of information and ideas. Combining the latest psychological and sociological research with current trends both online and off, Digital Cosmopolitans highlights the challenges we face and the headway being made in creating a world that is truly connected.

Far from simply vanishing in the face of modernity, Orthodox Jews in the United States today are surviving and flourishing. Samuel C. Heilman and Steven M. Cohen, both distinguished scholars of Jewish studies, have joined forces in this pathbreaking book to articulate this vibrancy and to characterize the many faces of Orthodox Jewry in contemporary America. Who are these Orthodox Jews? How have they survived, what do they believe and practice and how do they accommodate the tension between traditional Jewish and modern American values? Drawing on a survey of more than one thousand participants, the authors address these questions and many more. Heilman and Cohen reveal that American Jewish Orthodoxy is not a monolith by distinguishing its three broad varieties: the "traditionalists," the "centrists," and the "nominally" orthodox. To illuminate this full spectrum of orthodoxy the authors focus on the "centrists," taking us through the dimensions of their ritual observances, religious beliefs, community life, and their social, political, and sexual attitudes. Both parochial and cosmopolitan, orthodox and liberal, these Jews are characterized by their dualism, by their successful involvement in both the modern Western world and in traditional Jewish culture. In painting this provocative and fascinating portrait of what Jewish Orthodoxy has become in America today, Heilman and Cohen's study also sheds light on the larger picture of the persistence of religion in the modern world.

Tricksters and Cosmopolitans is the first sustained exploration into the history of cross-cultural collaborations between Asian American writers and their non–Asian American editors and publishers. The volume focuses on the literary production of the cosmopolitan subject, featuring the writers Sui Sin Far, Jessica Hagedorn, Karen Tei Yamashita, Monique Truong, and Min Jin Lee. The newly imagined cosmopolitan subject that emerges from their works dramatically reconfigured Asian American female subjectivity in metropolitan space with a kind of fluidity and ease never before seen. But as Rei Magosaki shows, these narratives also invariably expose the problematic side of this figure, which also serves to perpetuate exploitative structures of Western imperialism and its legacies in late capitalism. Arguing that the actual establishment of such a critical standpoint on imperialism and globalization required the expansive and internationalist vision of editors who supported, cultivated, and promoted these works, Tricksters and Cosmopolitans reveals the negotiations between these authors and their publishers and between the shared investment in both politics and aesthetics that influenced the narrative structure of key works in the Asian American literary canon.

Ranging from the founding era to Reconstruction, from the making of the modern state to its post-New Deal limits, John Fabian Witt illuminates the legal and constitutional foundations of American nationhood through the stories of five patriots and critics. In their own way, each of these individuals came up against the power of American national institutions to shape the directions of legal change.

This new collection of essays explores questions of subjectification, selfhood and identity in the contemporary Asia Pacific, examining the way that migrant lives express the complex interplay of local and global processes in the post-Cold War era, and collectively questioning the novelty of the 'global age' in this region.