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Using Mongolia as its example, this book examines how knowledge is transmitted and transformed in light of political change by looking at shifting conceptions of historical figures. It suggests that the reflection of people's concept of themselves is a much greater influence in the writing of history than has previously been thought and examines in detail how history was used to subvert the socialist project in Mongolia. This is the first study of the symbolic struggle over who controlled 'the past' and the 'true' identity of a Mongol, fought between the ruling party and its protesters during the democratic revolution.
A significant aspect of this work is the emphasis on source materials, including some translated from Mongolian and other languages for the first time. The source materials and other articles are all fully contextualized and situated by introductory material by the volume’s editors. This is the first work in English to bring together significant articles in Mongolian studies in one place, which will be widely welcomed by scholars and researchers in this field. This essential reference in two volumes includes works by noted scholars including Charles Bawden, Igor de Rachewiltz, David Morgan, Owen Lattimore and Caroline Humphrey. It also includes excerpts from translations of source documents, such as the works of Rashid al-Din, The Secret History of the Mongols and the Yuan Shih. In addition, more recent historical periods are covered, with material such as Batmonh’s speech that heralded Mongolia’s versions of glasnost and perestroika, as well as Baabar’s Buu Mart, a key work associated with the Democratic Revolution of 1990.
Before becoming the second socialist country in the world (after the Soviet Union) in 1921, Mongolia had been a Buddhist feudal theocracy. Combatting the influence of the dominant Buddhist establishment to win the hearts and minds of the Mongolian people was one of the most important challenges faced by the new socialist government. It would take almost a decade and a half to resolve the “lama question,” and it would be answered with brutality, destruction, and mass killings. Chris Kaplonski examines this critical, violent time in the development of Mongolia as a nation-state and its ongoing struggle for independence and recognition in the twentieth century. Unlike most studies that expl...
Health and development require one another: there can be no development without a critical mass of people who are sufficiently healthy to do whatever it takes for development to occur, and people cannot be healthy without societal developments that enable standards of health to be maintained or improved. However, the ways in which health and development interact are complex and contested. This volume unites eleven case studies from nine countries in three continents and two international organizations since the late-nineteenth century. Collectively, they show how different actors have struggled to reconcile the sometimes contradictory nature of health and development policies, and the subordination of these policies to a range of political objectives.
The Oxford Handbook of Environmental History draws on a wealth of new scholarship to offer diverse perspectives on the state of the field.
The memory of past atrocity lingers like a ghost at the table of democracy. Injustices carried out in the past - from massacres and murder to repression and detention - embitter societies and distort their structures so that the process of establishing and running a democracy carries an extra burden. This volume examines societies at various stages of dealing with the memory of the past, from China, Mongolia, Indonesia and the Baltic States, where bitter memories of death and persecution still intrude, to Finland, where the civil war of 1918 has finally been accepted as a distant national tragedy.
The Migration Age is still envisioned as an onrush of expansionary "Germans" pouring unwanted into the Roman Empire and subjecting it to pressures so great that its western parts collapsed under the weight. Further developing the themes set forth in his classic Barbarians and Romans, Walter Goffart dismantles this grand narrative, shaking the barbarians of late antiquity out of this "Germanic" setting and reimagining the role of foreigners in the Later Roman Empire. The Empire was not swamped by a migratory Germanic flood for the simple reason that there was no single ancient Germanic civilization to be transplanted onto ex-Roman soil. Since the sixteenth century, the belief that purposeful ...
These studies examine the ways in which succeeding democratic regimes have dealt with, or have ignored (and in several cases sugar-coated) an authoritarian or totalitarian past from 1943 to the present. They treat the relationship with democratization and the different ways in which collective memory is formed and dealt with, or ignored and suppressed. Previous books have examined only restricted sets of countries, such as western or eastern Europe, or Latin America. The present volume treats a broader range of cases than any preceding account, and also a much broader time-span, investigating diverse historical and cultural contexts, and the role of national identity and nationalism, studyin...
The collapse of the Soviet Union and the wars in Yugoslavia radically changed the security environment in Europe and Central Asia. Some predictions assumed the emerging unipolarity of the liberal world order would end neutrality policies in East and West, but, as this volume shows, this was not the case. While some traditional Cold War neutrals like Sweden and Finland have been edging closer to security alignment with western institutions, there are others like Austria, Switzerland, Ireland, and Malta that remained committed to their traditional nonaligned foreign policy approaches. More importantly, there are areas of Eurasia that developed new forms of neutrality policies, most of them onl...
Mongolian Buddhism is the first book to explore the development of Mongolia's state religion, from its formation in the thirteenth century around the time of Chinggis Qaan (Genghis Khan) until its demise in the twentieth century under the Soviet Union. Until its downfall, Mongolian Buddhism had served as a scientific, political, and medical resource for the Mongolian people. During the 1930s, Mongolian Buddhist monasticism, the caretaker of these resources, was methodically and systematically demolished. Lamas were forced to apostatize, and were either enslaved or executed. Now, after the fall of the Soviet Union, Mongolian Buddhism has reemerged in a country that has yet to fully confront its bloody past. Through historical analysis of Tibetan, Chinese, and Russian accounts of history, Michael Jerryson offers a much-needed religio-political perspective on the ebb and flow of Buddhism and the Sangha in Mongolia.