A young boy rides the train through Tennessee's beautiful, historic, and interesting landscapes. From the Blue Ridge to the Appalachian Ridge and Valley Region, the Cumberland Plateau, the Highland Rim, and the Nashville Basin, the narrator experiences the marvels of his home state. He hikes, fishes, and even tours Graceland! This is Maggie Bunn's fifth project and she is looking forward to sharing and creating more stories. Rosalind Bunn is the author of nine children's books and is excit...

Japan is on the verge of a sea change. After more than fifty years of national pacifism and isolation including the "lost decade" of the 1990s, Japan is quietly, stealthily awakening. As Japan prepares to become a major player in the strategic struggles of the 21st century, critical questions arise about its motivations. What are the driving forces that influence how Japan will act in the international system? Are there recurrent patterns that will help explain how Japan will respond to th...

“Sober and well-informed. . . . A careful and compelling examination of the U.S.-Chinese relationship from a number of angles.”—Financial TimesThere may be no denying China's growing economic strength, but its impact on the global balance of power remains hotly contested. Political scientist Aaron L. Friedberg argues that our nation's leaders are failing to act expeditiously enough to counter China's growing strength. He explains how the United States and ...

In a single short book as elegant as it is wise, Ian Buruma makes sense of the most fateful span of Japan’s history, the period that saw as dramatic a transformation as any country has ever known. In the course of little more than a hundred years from the day Commodore Matthew Perry arrived in his black ships, this insular, preindustrial realm mutated into an expansive military dictatorship that essentially supplanted the British, French, Dutch, and American empires in Asia before plunging...

Japan is arguably today's most successful industrial economy, combining almost unprecedented affluence with social stability and apparent harmony. Japanese goods and cultural products are consumed all over the world, ranging from animated movies and computer games all the way through to cars, semiconductors, and management techniques. In many ways, Japan is an icon of the modern world, and yet it remains something of an enigma to many, who see it as a confusing montage of the alien and the...

In this provocative book, renowned public intellectual Ivan Krastev reflects on the future of the European Union—and its potential lack of a future. With far-right nationalist parties on the rise across the continent and the United Kingdom planning for Brexit, the European Union is in disarray and plagued by doubts as never before. Krastev includes chapters devoted to Europe's major problems (especially the political destabilization sparked by the more than 1.3 million migrants from the Mi...

Distinguishing four sources of power - ideological, economic, military and political - this series traces their interrelations throughout human history. This third volume of Michael Mann's analytical history of social power begins with nineteenth-century global empires and continues with a global history of the twentieth century up to 1945. Mann focuses on the interrelated development of capitalism, nation-states and empires. Volume 3 discusses the 'Great Divergence' between the fortunes o...

At the dawn of the twenty-first century, three ideas dominate the world: peace as the preferred basis for relations between and among different countries, democracy as the optimal way to organize political life, and free markets as the indispensable vehicle for the creation of wealth. While not practiced everywhere, these ideas have--for the first time in history--no serious rivals. And although the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, were terrible and traumatic, they did not "change ...

Veteran scholar and peace activist David Cortright offers a definitive history of the human striving for peace and an analysis of its religious and intellectual roots. This authoritative, balanced, and highly readable volume traces the rise of peace advocacy and internationalism from their origins in earlier centuries through the mass movements of recent decades: the pacifist campaigns of the 1930s, the Vietnam antiwar movement, and the waves of disarmament activism that peaked in the 1980...

Since the end of the Cold War China and Japan have faced each other as powers of relatively equal strength for the first time in their long history. As the two great powers of East Asia the way they both compete and cooperate with each other and the way they conduct their relations in the new era will play a big part in the evolution of the region as a whole.This textbook will explore in detail the ways in which politics has shaped the thinking about history and identity in both Ch...

Despite witnessing phenomenal economic growth and the spread of democratization in recent decades, as well as impressive intra-regional exchanges and interactions in the economic and cultural spheres, the Northeast Asian region still experience wounds from past wrongs that were committed in times of colonialism, war and dictatorship. Overcoming these historical animosities has become one of the most pressing issues of the future for the region. Of all the countries in the Northeast Asia re...

Japan and China have been rivals for more than a millennium. In more recent times, China was the more powerful until the late nineteenth century, while Japan took the upper hand in the twentieth. Now, China's resurgence has emboldened it even as Japan perceives itself falling behind, exacerbating long-standing historical frictions. June Teufel Dreyer's Middle Kingdom and Empire of the Rising Sun provides a highly accessible overview of one of the world's great civilizational rival...