History

This book is a comparative analysis of how Western democratic nations have coped with AIDS. The book's exploration of divergent approaches to the epidemic in the United States and several European nations is a springboard for a wide-ranging historical analysis of public health practices and policies. In addition to a comprehensive presentation of information on approaches to AIDS, the book provides a new perspective on our most enduring political dilemma: how to reconcile individual liberty with the safety of the community. The book finds that Western democratic nations have adopted much more varied approaches to AIDS than is commonly recognized. It situates the range of responses to AIDS within the span of past attempts to control contagious disease and discovers the crucial role that history has played in developing these various approaches. The text finds that the various tactics adopted to fight AIDS have sprung largely from those adopted against the classic epidemic diseases of the nineteenth century—especially cholera—and that they reflect the long institutional memories embodied in public health institutions.

This book unsettles the idea of globalization as a recent phenomenon—and one driven solely by Western interests—by offering a new perspective on global interconnectivity in the nineteenth century. The book examines East African consumers' changing desires for material goods from around the world in an era of sweeping social and economic change. Exploring complex webs of local consumer demands that affected patterns of exchange and production as far away as India and the United States, the book challenges presumptions that Africa's global relationships have always been dictated by outsiders. Full of vignettes that outline forgotten trajectories of global trade and consumption, it demonstrates how contemporary globalization is foreshadowed in deep histories of intersecting and reciprocal relationships across vast distances.

The grand exhibitions of the Victorian and Edwardian eras are the lens through which this book examines the economic, cultural, and social forces that helped define Britain and the British Empire. The author focuses on major exhibitions in England, Australia, and India between the Great Exhibition of 1851 and the Festival of Empire sixty years later, taking special interest in the interactive nature of the exhibition experience, the long-term consequences for the participants and host societies, and the ways in which such popular gatherings revealed dissent as well as celebration. He shows how exhibitions shaped culture and society within and across borders in the transnational working of the British Empire. The exhibitions were central to establishing and developing a participatory imperial world in which each polity provided distinctive information, visitors, and exhibits. Among the displays were commercial goods, working machines, and ethnographic scenes. Exhibits were intended to promote external commonwealth and internal nationalism. The imperial overlay did not erase significant differences, but explained and used them in economic and cultural terms. The exhibitions in cities such as London, Sydney, and Calcutta were living and active public inventories of the Empire and its national political communities. The process of building and consuming such inventories persists today in the cultural bureaucracies, museums, and festivals of modern nation-states; the appeal to tradition and social order; and the actions of transnational bodies.

Figurative images have long played a critical, if largely unexamined, role in Africa—mediating relationships between the colonizer and the colonized, the state and the individual, and the global and the local. This book considers the meaning and power of images in African history and culture. The chapters include specific visual forms, including monuments, cinema, cartoons, domestic and professional photography, body art, world fairs, and museum exhibits. The chapters discuss various modes of visuality in Africa and of Africa, investigating the interplay of visual images with personal identity, class, gender, politics, and wealth. Integral to the argument of the book are over seventy contextualized illustrations. Africans saw foreigners in margarine wrappers, Tintin cartoons, circus posters, and Hollywood movies; westerners gleaned impressions of Africans from colonial exhibitions, Tarzan films, and naturalist magazines. The chapters provide concrete examples of the construction of Africa's image in the modern world. They reveal how imperial iconographies sought to understand, deny, control, or transform authority, as well as the complexity and hybridity of visual communication within Africa itself.

This is a chronicle of Germany's and Japan's struggles to reclaim a defeated national past. The author compares the ways German and Japanese scholars revised national history after World War II in the shadows of fascism, surrender, and American occupation. Defeat in 1945 marked the death of the national past in both countries, yet, as the author proves, historians did not abandon national perspectives during reconstruction. Quite the opposite—the nation remained hidden at the center of texts as scholars tried to make sense of the past and searched for fragments of the nation they had lost. By situating both countries in the Cold War, the author shows that the focus on the nation can be understood only within a transnational context.

In 1671, Ambrosio Bembo, a young nobleman bored with everyday life in Venice, decided to broaden his knowledge of the world through travel. That August he set off on a remarkable, occasionally hazardous, four-year voyage to Syria, Turkey, Iraq, Iran, and the Portuguese colonies of western India. His journal, translated into English in this book, is the most important new European travel account of western Asia to be published in the past hundred years. It opens a perspective on the Near East and India at a time when few Europeans traveled to these lands. Bembo's account is filled with a high sense of adventure and curiosity and provides intriguing descriptions of people, landscapes, food, fashion, architecture, customs, cities, commerce, and more. The account is presented here with the original illustrations and with an introduction and annotations.