STUDIES OF THE WEAI BOOK SERIES Max M. Ward (Duke University Press, 2019) For information from the publisher, please click here. In Thought Crime Max M. Ward explores the Japanese state's efforts to suppress political radicalism in the 1920s and 1930s. Ward traces the evolution of an anti-radical law called the Peace Preservation Law, from its initial application to … [Read more...]
Fixing Landscape: A Techno-Poetic History of China’s Three Gorges
STUDIES OF THE WEAI BOOK SERIES Corey Byrnes (Columbia University Press, 2018) For information from the publisher, please click here. In 1994, workers broke ground on China’s Three Gorges Dam. By its completion in 2012, the dam had transformed the ecology of the Yangzi River, displaced over a million people, and forever altered a landscape immortalized in centuries … [Read more...]
Heroes and Toilers: Work as Life in Postwar North Korea, 1953–1961
STUDIES OF THE WEAI BOOK SERIES Cheehyung Harrison Kim (Columbia University Press, 2018) For information from the publisher, please click here. In North Korea in the decade following the Korean War, labor became the defining means of state control and national unity. In pursuit of rapid industrial growth, the North Korean state stressed order and consistency in … [Read more...]
Electrified Voices: How the Telephone, Phonograph, and Radio Shaped Modern Japan, 1868–1945
STUDIES OF THE WEAI BOOK SERIES Kerim Yasar (Columbia University Press, 2018) For information from the publisher, please click here. Long before karaoke’s ubiquity and the rise of global brands such as Sony, Japan was a place where new audio technologies found eager users and contributed to new cultural forms. In Electrified Voices, Kerim Yasar traces the origins of … [Read more...]
The Invention of Madness: State, Society, and the Insane in Modern China
STUDIES OF THE WEAI BOOK SERIES Emily Baum (University of Chicago Press, 2018) For information from the publisher, please click here. Throughout most of history, in China the insane were kept within the home and treated by healers who claimed no specialized knowledge of their condition. In the first decade of the twentieth century, however, psychiatric ideas and … [Read more...]
