The ancient story of King Goujian, a psychologically complex fifth-century BCE monarch, spoke powerfully to the Chinese during China's turbulent twentieth century. Yet most Americans—even students and specialists of this era—have never heard of Goujian. In <I>Speaking to History, </I>Paul A. Cohen opens this previously missing (to the West) chapter of China's recent history. He connects the story to each of the major trauma ...
A surprising number of Jews lived, literally and figuratively, «beyond the Pale» of Jewish Settlement in tsarist Russia during the half-century before the Revolution of 1917. Thanks to the availability of long-closed Russian archives, along with a wide range of other sources, Benjamin Nathans reinterprets the history of the Russian-Jewish encounter.<br /><br />In the wake of Russia's «Great Reforms,» Nathans writes, a policy of ...