During the past three centuries, California has stood at the crossroads of European, Asian, Native American and Latino cultures, and seen the best and worst of multiracial and multi-ethnic interaction. The Human Tradition in California captures the region's rich history and takes readers into the daily lives of ordinary Californians at key moments in time. Professors Davis and Igler have selected essays that emphasize how individual people and communities have experienced and influenced the broad social, cultural, political and economic forces that have shaped California history. Organized chronologically from the pre-mission period through the late-twentieth century, this book taps into the whole spectrum of Californian experience and offers new perspectives on the state's complex social character. The story is personalized through the use of mini-biographies, drawing readers directly into the narrative.

The Human Tradition in the American West is an engrossing collection of 13 biographies of men and women whose contributions to the development of the American West have largely been left untold in the history books. This volume goes beyond the traditional biographical reader by including the lives that collectively offer racial and gender diversity as well as differing class and sexual orientation backgrounds. Editors Benson Tong and Regan A. Lutz have assembled an impressive group of scholars whose succinct and well-written accounts will give students a more complete understanding of this diverse, dynamic region of the United States. This book is an excellent resource for courses on the American West, U.S. history survey courses and courses in American social and cultural history.

The period between 1870 and 1920 was one of the most dynamic in American history. This era witnessed the invention of the automobile, the establishment of women's suffrage, and the opening of the Panama Canal. While a time of great advance-ment, the Gilded Age and Progressive Era were also periods of uncertainty as Americans coped with corrupt politicians, unchecked big business, and a vast influx of immigrants. SR Books offers a new approach to this time period in its book The Human Tradition in the Gilded Age and Progressive Era. This volume looks at the experiences of 13 people who contributed to the shaping of American culture and thought during this period. These concise accounts are written by leading historians and give students an intimate view of history. This is an excellent text for courses in American studies.

This lively and engaging text offers a panorama of modern Chinese history through compelling biographies of the famous and obscure. Spanning five hundred years, they include a Ming dynasty medical pioneer, a Qing dynasty courtesan, a nineteenth-century Hong Kong business leader, a Manchu princess, an arsenal manager, a woman soldier, and a young maid in contemporary Beijing. Through the lives of these diverse people, readers will gain an understanding of the complex questions of modern Chinese history: What did it mean to be Chinese, and how did that change over time? How was learning encouraged and directed in imperial and post-imperial China? Was it possible to challenge entrenched gender roles? What effects did European imperialism have on Chinese lives? How did ordinary Chinese experience the warfare and political upheaval of twentieth-century China? What is the nature of the gap between urban and rural China in the post-Mao years? These richly researched biographies are written in an accessible and appealing style that will engage all readers interested in modern China. Contributions by: Daria Berg, John M. Carroll, Kenneth J. Hammond, Joshua H. Howard, Fabio Lanza, Oliver Moore, Pan Yihong, Hugh Shapiro, Kristin Stapleton, and Shuo Wang

This collection of compact biographies puts a human face on the sweeping historical processes that shaped contemporary societies throughout the Atlantic world. Focusing on life stories that represented movement across or around the Atlantic Ocean from 1500 to 1850, The Human Tradition in the Atlantic World, 1500–1850 explores transatlantic connections by following individuals—be they slaves, traders, or adventurers—whose experience took them far beyond their local communities to new and unfamiliar places. Whatever their reasons, tremendous creativity and dynamism resulted from contact between people of different cultures, classes, races, ideas, and systems in Africa, Europe, and the Americas. By emphasizing movement and circulation in its choice of life stories, this readable and engaging volume presents a broad cross-section of people—both famous and everyday—whose lives and livelihoods took them across the Atlantic and brought disparate cultures into contact.

The Human Tradition in Modern Japan is a collection of short biographies of ordinary Japanese men and women, most of them unknown outside their family and locality, whose lives collectively span the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Their stories present a counterweight to the prevailing stereotypes, providing students with depictions of real people through the records they have left-records that detail experiences and aspirations. The Human Tradition in Modern Japan offers a human-scale perspective that focuses on individuals, reconstitutes the meaning of people's experiences as they lived through them, and puts a human face on history. It skillfully bridges the divides between the sexes, between the local and the national, and between rural and urban, as well as spanning crucial moments in the history of modern Japan. The Human Tradition in Modern Japan is an excellent resource for courses on Japanese history, East Asian history, and peoples and cultures of Japan.

Like snapshots of everyday life in the past, the compelling biographies in this book document the making of the Black Atlantic world since the sixteenth century from the point of view of those who were part of it. Centering on the diaspora caused by the forced migration of Africans to Europe and across the Atlantic to the Americas, the chapters explore the slave trade, enslavement, resistance, adaptation, cultural transformations, and the quest for citizenship rights. The variety of experiences, constraints and choices depicted in the book and their changes across time and space defy the idea of a unified "black experience." At the same time, it is clear that in the twentieth century, "black" identity unified people of African descent who, along with other "minority" groups, struggled against colonialism and racism and presented alternatives to a version of modernity that excluded and alienated them. Drawing on a rich array of little-known documents, the contributors reconstruct the lives and times of some well-known characters along with ordinary people who rarely left written records and would otherwise have remained anonymous and unknown. Contributions by: Aaron P. Althouse, Alan Bloom, Marcus J. M. de Carvalho, Aisnara Perera Díaz, María de los Ángeles Meriño Fuentes, Flávio dos Santos Gomes, Hilary Jones, Beatriz G. Mamigonian, Charles Beatty Medina, Richard Price, Sally Price, Cassandra Pybus, Karen Racine, Ty M. Reese, João José Reis, Lorna Biddle Rinear, Meredith L. Roman, Maya Talmon-Chvaicer, and Jerome Teelucksingh.

Calhoun (history, East Carolina U., Greenville) offers a reader of 19 biographical essays from a series surveying modern US history from the perspective of a diversity of citizens: e.g. a former slave, interned Japanese immigrants, and champions of various causes. Annotation (c) Book News, Inc., Por

Evolution and Human Culture argues that values, beliefs, and practices are expressions of individual and shared moral sentiments. Much of our cultural production stems from what in early hominins was a caring tendency, both the care to share and a self-care to challenge others. Topics cover prehistory, mind, biology, morality, comparative primatology, art, and aesthetics. The book is valuable to students and scholars in the arts, including moral philosophers, who would benefit from reading about scientific developments that impact their fields. For biologists and social scientists the book provides a window into how scientific research contributes to understanding the arts and humanities. The take-home point is that culture does not transcend nature; rather, culture is an evolved moral behavior.

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