In the first comprehensive analysis of Chinese masculinity. Kam Louie uses the concepts of wen (cultural attainment) and wu (martial valour) to explain attitudes to masculinity. This revises most Western analyses of Asian masculinity that rely on the yin-yang binary. Examining classical and contemporary Chinese literature and film, the book also looks at the Chinese diaspora to consider Chinese masculinity within and outside China.

Written by leading authorities in database and Web technologies, this book is essential reading for students and practitioners alike. The popularity of the Web and Internet commerce provides many extremely large datasets from which information can be gleaned by data mining. This book focuses on practical algorithms that have been used to solve key problems in data mining and can be applied successfully to even the largest datasets. It begins with a discussion of the map-reduce framework, an important tool for parallelizing algorithms automatically. The authors explain the tricks of locality-sensitive hashing and stream processing algorithms for mining data that arrives too fast for exhaustive processing. Other chapters cover the PageRank idea and related tricks for organizing the Web, the problems of finding frequent itemsets and clustering. This second edition includes new and extended coverage on social networks, machine learning and dimensionality reduction.

Case Study Research: Principles and Practices provides a general understanding of the case study method as well as specific tools for its successful implementation. These tools are applicable in a variety of fields including anthropology, business and management, communications, economics, education, medicine, political science, psychology, social work, and sociology. Topics include: a survey of case study approaches; a methodologically tractable definition of 'case study'; strategies for case selection, including random sampling and other algorithmic approaches; quantitative and qualitative modes of case study analysis; and problems of internal and external validity. The second edition of this core textbook is designed to be accessible to readers who are new to the subject and is thoroughly revised and updated, incorporating recent research and numerous up-to-date studies.

When published in 1982, this translation of Professor Jacques Gernet's masterly survey of the history and culture of China was immediately welcomed by critics and readers. This revised and updated edition makes it more useful for students and for the general reader concerned with the broad sweep of China's past.

Review
'All English-speaking students of Dante will be immensely grateful to Prue Shaw for her splendid edition and translation of Dante's Latin treatise on world government. This is by far the best English translation of the Monarchia ...' Italian Studies
Product Description
This is the first new translation for forty years of a fascinating work of political theory, until now only available in academic libraries. Dante's Monarchy addresses the fundamental question of what form of political organization best suits human nature; it embodies a political vision of startling originality and power, and illuminates the intellectual interests and achievements of one of the world's great poets. Prue Shaw's translation is accompanied by a full introduction and notes, which provide a complete guide to the text, and places Monarchy in the context of Dante's life and work.

Edmund Fung examines an important phase of development in China's long quest for democracy. The momentum for democracy, he contends, grew strongest between 1929 and 1949 through civil opposition to the one-party rule of the Guomindang. The Nationalist era contained the germs of a reformist, liberal order, the legacy of which can be seen in the pro-democracy movement of the post-Mao period. This book fills an important gap in the historical literature on Chinese intellectuals between May Fourth radicalism and the Chinese Communists' accession to power.

All societies must deal with the possibility of violence, and they do so in different ways. This book integrates the problem of violence into a larger social science and historical framework, showing how economic and political behavior are closely linked. Most societies, which we call natural states, limit violence by political manipulation of the economy to create privileged interests. These privileges limit the use of violence by powerful individuals, but doing so hinders both economic and political development. In contrast, modern societies create open access to economic and political organizations, fostering political and economic competition. The book provides a framework for understanding the two types of social orders, why open access societies are both politically and economically more developed, and how some 25 countries have made the transition between the two types.

People of European descent form the bulk of the population in most of the temperate zones of the world - North America, Australia and New Zealand. The military successes of European imperialism are easy to explain; in many cases they were a matter of firearms against spears. But, as Alfred Crosby maintains in this highly original and fascinating book, the Europeans' displacement and replacement of the native peoples in the temperate zones was more a matter of biology than of military conquest. European organisms had certain decisive advantages over their New World and Australian counterparts. The spread of European disease, flora, and fauna went hand in hand with the growth of populations. Consequently, these imperialists became proprietors of the world's most important agricultural lands. Now in a new edition with a new preface, Crosby revisits his now-classic work and again evaluates the global historical importance of European ecological expansion.

This book is a study of ancient views about "moral luck." It examines the fundamental ethical problem that many of the valued constituents of a well-lived life are vulnerable to factors outside a person's control, and asks how this affects our appraisal of persons and their lives. The Greeks made a profound contribution to these questions, yet neither the problems nor the Greek views of them have received the attention they deserve. This updated edition contains a new preface.

This extended essay by one of the world's leading historians seeks, in its first part, to excavate and vindicate the neo-Roman theory of free citizens and free states as it developed in early modern Britain. This analysis leads to a powerful defense of the nature, purposes and goals of intellectual history and the history of ideas. In this concise yet powerful account, derived from his inaugural lecture as Regius Professor at Cambridge, Quentin Skinner provides one of the most substantial statements yet made about the importance, relevance and excitement of this form of historical enquiry.

Case Study Research: Principles and Practices provides a general understanding of the case study method as well as specific tools for its successful implementation. These tools are applicable in a variety of fields including anthropology, business and management, communications, economics, education, medicine, political science, psychology, social work, and sociology. Topics include: a survey of case study approaches; a methodologically tractable definition of 'case study'; strategies for case selection, including random sampling and other algorithmic approaches; quantitative and qualitative modes of case study analysis; and problems of internal and external validity. The second edition of this core textbook is designed to be accessible to readers who are new to the subject and is thoroughly revised and updated, incorporating recent research and numerous up-to-date studies.

Professor Jack Goody builds on his own previous work to extend further his highly influential critique of what he sees as the pervasive eurocentric or occidentalist biases of so much western historical writing. Goody also examines the consequent 'theft' by the West of the achievements of other cultures in the invention of (notably) democracy, capitalism, individualism, and love. The Theft of History discusses a number of theorists in detail, including Marx, Weber and Norbert Elias, and engages with critical admiration western historians like Fernand Braudel, Moses Finlay and Perry Anderson. Major questions of method are raised, and Goody proposes a new comparative methodology for cross-cultural analysis, one that gives a much more sophisticated basis for assessing divergent historical outcomes, and replaces outmoded simple differences between East and West. The Theft of History will be read by an unusually wide audience of historians, anthropologists and social theorists.

Why would authoritarian leaders ever lose elections? Valerie J. Bunce and Sharon L. Wolchik answer this question by analyzing a remarkable run of electoral victories by the opposition in postcommunist Europe and Eurasia from 1998 to 2005. They conclude that these upset elections occurred because of the hard and creative work of a transnational network that was committed to electoral change and composed of local opposition and civil society groups, members of the international democracy assistance community, and graduates of successful electoral challenges to authoritarian rule in other countries.

Inflationary cosmology has been developed over the last twenty years to remedy serious shortcomings in the standard hot big bang model of the universe. Taking an original approach, this textbook explains the basis of modern cosmology and shows where the theoretical results come from. The book is divided into two parts; the first deals with the homogeneous and isotropic model of the Universe, the second part discusses how inhomogeneities can explain its structure. Established material such as the inflation and quantum cosmological perturbation are presented in great detail, however the reader is brought to the frontiers of current cosmological research by the discussion of more speculative ideas. An ideal textbook for both advanced students of physics and astrophysics, all of the necessary background material is included in every chapter and no prior knowledge of general relativity and quantum field theory is assumed.

This book describes how the Chinese government, between about 620 and 850, developed an official organization designed to select, process, and edit material for inclusion in official historical works eventually to be incorporated in an official history of the dynasty. The first part gives a detailed account of the establishment of the official apparatus designed to produce a record of the T'ang dynasty, which would remain standard for more than a millennium, with some analysis of the individuals who served in these offices. The second part gives all available detail about the various works produced by this apparatus, divided among its various genres, and listing all known titles, their authorship, and their relationships to one another. The third part shows the cumulative process by which a dynastic history came into being, and the way in which we can detect various elements in the completed history.

Prior to the nineteenth century, the practice of medicine in the Western world was as much art as science. But, argues W. F. Bynum, 'modern' medicine as practiced today is built upon foundations that were firmly established between 1800 and the beginning of World War I. He demonstrates this in terms of concepts, institutions, and professional structures that evolved during this crucial period, applying both a more traditional intellectual approach to the subject and the newer social perspectives developed by recent historians of science and medicine. In a wide-ranging survey, Bynum examines the parallel development of biomedical sciences such as physiology, pathology, bacteriology, and immunology, and of clinical practice and preventive medicine in nineteenth-century Europe and North America. Focusing on medicine in the hospitals, the community, and the laboratory, Bynum contends that the impact of science was more striking on the public face of medicine and the diagnostic skills of doctors than it was on their actual therapeutic capacities.