Through biographies of China's most colorful and famous personalities, John Wills displays the five-thousand-year sweep of Chinese history from the legendary sage emperors to the tragedy of Tiananmen Square. This unique introduction to Chinese history and culture uses more than twenty exemplary lives--biographies of China's most colorful and famous personalities--including those of statesmen, philosophers, poets, and rulers, to provide the focus for accounts of key historical trends and pe...

China and Maritime Europe, 1500–1800 looks at early modern China in some of its most complicated and intriguing relations with a world of increasing global interconnection. New World silver, Chinese tea, Jesuit astronomers at the Chinese court, and merchants and marauders of all kinds play important roles here. Although pieces of these stories have been told before, these chapters provide the fullest and clearest available summaries, based on sources in Chinese and in European languages, m...

In The World from 1450 to 1700, historian John Wills takes a fresh look at one of the most fascinating and tumultuous periods in world history. Assuming a global perspective, rather than the traditional Eurocentric view, Wills traces the interwoven changes that led from the world of Columbus, Luther, and the Mughal emperor Babur to the world of Locke, Louis XIV, and the Kangxi emperor. The book's multi-centered approach explores historical events not in isolation but rather in a dynamic ...

In The World from 1450 to 1700, historian John Wills takes a fresh look at one of the most fascinating and tumultuous periods in world history. Assuming a global perspective, rather than the traditional Eurocentric view, Wills traces the interwoven changes that led from the world of Columbus, Luther, and the Mughal emperor Babur to the world of Locke, Louis XIV, and the Kangxi emperor. The book's multi-centered approach explores historical events not in isolation but rather in a d...

In recent times, the Asia-Pacific region has far surpassed Europe in terms of reciprocal trade with the United States, and since the 1980s immigrants from Asia entering the United States have exceeded their counterparts from Europe, reversing a longstanding historical trend and making Asian Americans the country’s fastest growing racial group. What does transpacific history look like if the arc of the story is extended to the present?The essays in this volume offer answers to this ...

Ronald J. Pestritto's and Thomas G. West's earlier volume The American Founding and the Social Compact addressed the nature of the thought and philosophy of the men who shaped the American founding. In this second volume in a trilogy, Pestritto and West examine the fate of the founders' principles in the nine teeth century, when these principles faced their first great challenges. Support of slavery, culminating in secession and civil war, came from the South; and after the war came positi...

Sea Rovers, Silver, and Samurai traces the roots of modern global East Asia by focusing on the fascinating history of its seaways. The East Asian maritime realm, from the Straits of Malacca to the Sea of Japan, has been a core region of international trade for millennia, but during the long seventeenth century (1550 to 1700), the velocity and scale of commerce increased dramatically. Chinese, Japanese, and Vietnamese smugglers and pirates forged autonomous networks and maritime po...

At a time when the basic costs of living continue to increase at a far greater pace than most wages and salaries, it’s become well known that the residential real estate sales industry can provide personal incomes that range from $100,000 to $1,000,000 per annum. This book, written during the 2008 Global Financial crisis, is a very personal account of someone who has worked step by step through a process of starting from zero to progress through to becoming a high achiever in the competiti...

Gripped by Fear, the second book in the Chicago Warriors series by John WillsPete Shannon and Marilyn Benson find themselves working their biggest case yet in their new role as Chicago Police Detectives. In this second book of the Chicago Warrior Thriller Series, a madman has inexplicably targeted women who labor as office cleaners in downtown Chicago, sexually assaulting them as they travel to and from their job.As the number of victims begins to ...

Over the past century, Disney has grown from a small American animation studio into a multipronged global media giant. Today, the company’s annual revenue exceeds the GDP of over 100 countries, and its portfolio has grown to include Pixar, Marvel, Lucasfilm, ABC, and ESPN. With a company so diversified, is it still possible to identify a coherent Disney vision or message?Disney Culture proposes that there is still a unifying Disney ethos, one that can be traced back to the...

Cultural scholar John Wills takes readers on a cultural tour of Doom Town, USA, designed to be the model 1950s American city and destroyed by an atomic bomb on live television to educate Americans on the need to prepare for possible nuclear war—but also to sell new products in the emerging postwar economic boom.In March 1953 and May 1955, government officials—including the Federal Civil Defense Administration (FCDA), the US Department of Defense, and the Atomic Ene...

Chicago Police Detectives Pete Shannon and Marilyn Benson are thrust into a homicide investigation, taking them away from the Violent Crimes Unit where they are normally assigned. A crazed gunman has been randomly targeting cops for his own deranged satisfaction. The duo finds themselves teamed with a pair of old-timers who do their best to interfere with the detectives’ leads and make their lives miserable. The hunt for the serial killer becomes a life-altering experience for the partners...