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How China is using the US-led war on terror to erase the cultural identity of its Muslim minority in the Xinjiang region Within weeks of the September 11 attacks on New York and Washington, the Chinese government warned that it faced a serious terrorist threat from its Uyghur ethnic minority, who are largely Muslim. In this explosive book, Sean Roberts reveals how China has been using the US-led global war on terror as international cover for its increasingly brutal suppression of the Uyghurs, and how the war's targeting of an undefined enemy has emboldened states around the globe to persecute ethnic minorities and severely repress domestic opposition in the name of combatting terrorism. Of ...
In 1482, the Florentine humanist and statesman Francesco Berlinghieri produced the Geographia, a book of over one hundred folio leaves describing the world in Italian verse, inspired by the ancient Greek geography of Ptolemy. The poem, divided into seven books (one for each day of the week the author “travels” the known world), is interleaved with lavishly engraved maps to accompany readers on this journey. Sean Roberts demonstrates that the Geographia represents the moment of transition between printing and manuscript culture, while forming a critical base for the rise of modern cartography. Simultaneously, the use of the Geographia as a diplomatic gift from Florence to the Ottoman Empire tells another story. This exchange expands our understanding of Mediterranean politics, European perceptions of the Ottomans, and Ottoman interest in mapping and print. The envoy to the Sultan represented the aspirations of the Florentine state, which chose not to bestow some other highly valued good, such as the city’s renowned textiles, but instead the best example of what Florentine visual, material, and intellectual culture had to offer.
The Assassin's Mace is the second of a five-book series featuring FBI Special Agent Sean Roberts and the companion to Scimitar Strike. As the recently appointed deputy is acclimating to his new position, the FBI's Joint Terrorist Task Force (JTTF) is responding to back-to-back attacks on the nation's capital. The threat horizon is about to expand exponentially. Following the death of Quds Force commander Qassem Soleimani, the Supreme Council for National Security of the Islamic Republic of Iran declared, "We will hold the United States responsible for the consequences of their criminal adventurism. The US shall learn the criminal attack against our beloved brother was the largest strategic m...
Following the demise of the USSR in 1991, and the ensuing collapse of communist regimes in Eastern Europe, widespread population movements took place across Central and Eastern Europe. Whole nations disappeared and (re)-emerged and diasporic transnational ties and belonging have experienced a revival. This book explores some of the many different facets of diasporic life and migration across Central and Eastern Europe by specifically employing the concept of cosmopolitanism. It examines aspects of migrants’ everyday lives and identities, considers some of the difficulties faced by migrant minorities in being accepted and integrated in the host societies, but also examines questions of citizenship and diasporic politics.
From its inception in 2001, the United Russia Party has rapidly developed into a hugely successful, organisationally-complex political party and key component of power. This book provides a much needed analysis on United Russia by exploring the role of the party in the Russian political system, from 2000 to 2010. It explores the party empirically, as an impressive organisation in its own right, but also theoretically, as an independent or explanatory variable able to illumine the larger development of dominant-power politics in Russia in the same period. The book creates a model to understand the role of political parties in electorally-based political systems and shows how United Russia con...
Life presents each of us with opportunities that require choices. Some choices can have a positive outcome. Others, unfortunately, can cause great pain. When Ellen Margel chose to marry Sean Roberts, a gregarious and successful entrepreneur, she never could have predicted the journey she would eventually take through hell and back. Margel was happy with her career as a teacher but even so, she felt that something was missinga husband and family. She was initially flattered by his charming ways and chose to overlook his flaws. All too soon, she was making excuses for his unpredictable behavior. In this memoir, Margel narrates a poignant story that discloses how a marriage that seemed happy at...
This book examines how Ottomans were mapped in the narrative and visual imagination of early modern Europe's Christian kingdoms.
The first full-length study of the impact of the discovery of the Americas on Italian Renaissance art and culture, Imagining the Americas in Medici Florence demonstrates that the Medici grand dukes of Florence were not only great patrons of artists but also early conservators of American culture. In collecting New World objects such as featherwork, codices, turquoise, and live plants and animals, the Medici grand dukes undertook a “vicarious conquest” of the Americas. As a result of their efforts, Renaissance Florence boasted one of the largest collections of objects from the New World as well as representations of the Americas in a variety of media. Through a close examination of archiv...
The first biography of an American-born Korean woman, Doing What Had to Be Done is, on the surface, the life story of Dora Yum Kim. But telling more than one woman's story, author Soo-Young Chin offers more than an unusual glimpse at the shaping of a remarkable community activist. In addition as she questions her subject, introduces each chapter, and reflects on how Dora's story relates to her own experience as a Korean-American who immigrated to this country as an adult she carves around Dora's compelling and courageous life story, a story of her own and one of all Korean-Americans. Born in 1921, Dora, as she tells Chin her story, chronicles the shifting salience of gendered ethnic identity as she journeys through her life. Traveling through time and place, she moves from San Francisco's Chinatown where Koreans were a minority within a minority to suburban Dewey Boulevard where Dora and her family attempt to integrate into mainstream America and where she becomes a social worker in the California State Department of Employment. As the Korean immigrant community grows in the late 1960s, Dora becomes deeply involved in community service. She remembers teaching English to senior ci
Secrets in all their variety permeated early modern Europe, from the whispers of ambassadors at court to the emphatically publicized books of home remedies that flew from presses and booksellers’ shops. This interdisciplinary volume draws on approaches from art history and cultural studies to investigate the manifestations of secrecy in printed books and drawings, staircases and narrative paintings, ecclesiastical furnishings and engravers’ tools. Topics include how patrons of art and architecture deployed secrets to construct meanings and distinguish audiences, and how artists and patrons manipulated the content and display of the subject matter of artworks to create an aura of exclusiv...