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A Translucent Mirror explores the origins of nationalism and cultural identity in China, revealing how the Qing dynasty incorporated neighbouring but disparate political traditions into a new style of imperialism.
Picture, if you can, a world without glass. There would be no microscopes or telescopes, no sciences of microbiology or astronomy. People with poor vision would grope in the shadows, and planes, cars, and even electricity probably wouldn't exist. Artists would draw without the benefit of three-dimensional perspective, and ships would still be steered by what stars navigators could see through the naked eye. In Glass: A World History, Alan Macfarlane and Gerry Martin tell the fascinating story of how glass has revolutionized the way we see ourselves and the world around us. Starting ten thousand years ago with its invention in the Near East, Macfarlane and Martin trace the history of glass and its uses from the ancient civilizations of India, China, and Rome through western Europe during the Renaissance, Enlightenment, and Industrial Revolution, and finally up to the present day. The authors argue that glass played a key role not just in transforming humanity's relationship with the natural world, but also in the divergent courses of Eastern and Western civilizations. While all the societies that used glass first focused on its beauty in jewelry and other ornaments, and some later made it into bottles and other containers, only western Europeans further developed the use of glass for precise optics, mirrors, and windows. These technological innovations in glass, in turn, provided the foundations for European domination of the world in the several centuries following the Scientific Revolution. Clear, compelling, and quite provocative, Glass is an amazing biography of an equally amazing subject, a subject that has been central to every aspect of human history, from art and science to technology and medicine.
This book provides enthusiastic photographers with a wealth of information about the unique features of the Sony SLT-A77, an interchangeable-lens camera with an electronic viewfinder and a fixed, translucent mirror. The A77 differs from the current crop of DSLRs in its ability to use a phase detection focusing system throughout the entire picture-taking process, for both still photographs and videos. This provides an immediacy and responsiveness when using burst shots and creating HD videos that is unavailable in any other camera. In this guide, authors Carol Roullard and Brian Matsumoto teach you how to obtain exceptional photographs and videos as they cover everything from the basics of using the camera's automatic modes, to the more advanced aperture-priority, shutter-priority, program, and manual exposure modes. You'll also learn how best to take advantage of features such as the built-in dynamic range adjustment, sweep panoramic, GPS, colorization modes, facial detection and recognition, multiple shot exposures, and HD video. The authors provide you with an opportunity to improve your skills even further by discussing how third-party software and accessories can improve Sony's standard commands. You'll also learn about how the electronic viewfinder, fixed mirror, and Sony's novel shutter design improve the camera's utility for scientific photography through the microscope and telescope. Additional topics include: Advantages of the electronic viewfinder for previewing your photographs Using the accessory Sony shoe-mount flash Advantages of using the JPEG file format Advantage of having a fixed mirror and electronic first curtain shutter Settings for using the camera on a microscope and telescope Using the older Minolta Maxxum lenses
"Imperial Masquerade: The Legend of Princess Der Ling, the first biography of one of the twentieth century's most intriguing cross-cultural personalities, traces not only the life of Princess Der Ling, in all its various transformations, but offers a fresh look at the woman she lionized and, ultimately, betrayed - the Empress Dowager Cixi, to whom, like Der Ling, many legends have been affixed over the past century. The book also depicts the changing worlds of Paris, Tokyo and the other international stages of Der Ling's development as woman and as mystery, and deals with the many teachers who made her who she was." --Book Jacket.
Focusing on the Ming and Qing eras, this book analyses crucial moments in the formation of cultural, regional and religious identities. It demonstrates how the imperial discourse is many-faceted, rather than a monolithic agent of cultural assimilation.
Shortlisted, 2024 Wallace K. Ferguson Prize, Canadian Historical Association China’s last imperial dynasty governed a vast and culturally diverse territory, encompassing a wide range of local political systems and regional elites. But the Qing empire was built and held together by a single imperial elite: the more than two million members of the hereditary Eight Banner system who were at the core of both the military and the bureaucracy. The banner population was multiethnic, linked by shared membership in a clearly demarcated status group defined in law and administrative practice. Banner people were bound to the court by an exchange of loyal service for institutionalized privilege, a relationship symbolically conceptualized as one of slave to master. Slaves of the Emperor explores the Qing approach to one of the fundamental challenges of early modern state-building: how to develop an effective bureaucracy with increasing administrative capacity to govern a growing polity while retaining the loyalty of the ruling family’s most important supporters. David C. Porter traces how the banner system created a service elite through its processes of incorporating new members, its employment of bannermen as technical specialists, its imposition of service obligations on women as well as men, and its response to fiscal and ideological challenges. Placing Qing practices in comparative perspective, he uncovers crucial parallels to similar institutions in Tokugawa Japan, imperial Russia, and the Ottoman Empire. Slaves of the Emperor provides a new framework for understanding the structure and function of elites both in China and across Eurasia in the early modern period.
Globalization has brought together otherwise disparate communities with distinctive and often conflicting ways of viewing the world. Yet even as these phenomena have exposed the culturally specific character of the academic theories used to understand them, most responses to this ethnocentricity fall back on the same parochial vocabulary they critique. Against those who insist our thinking must return always to the dominant terms of Euro-American modernity, Leigh Jenco argues - and more importantly, demonstrates - that methods for understanding cultural others can take theoretical guidance from those very bodies of thought typically excluded by political and social theory. Jenco examines a decades-long Chinese conversation over "Western Learning," starting in the mid-nineteenth century, which subjected methods of learning from difference to unprecedented scrutiny and development. Just as Chinese elites argued for the possibility of their producing knowledge along "Western" lines rather than "Chinese" ones, so too, Jenco argues, might we come to see foreign knowledge as a theoretical resource - that is, as a body of knowledge which formulates methods of argument, goals of inquiry, and criteria of evidence that may be generalizable to other places and times. The call of reformers such as Liang Qichao and Yan Fu to bianfa - literally "change the institutions" of Chinese society and politics in order to produce new kinds of Western knowledge-was simultaneously a call to "change the referents" those institutions sought to emulate, and from which participants might draw their self-understanding. Their arguments show that the institutional and cultural contexts which support the production of knowledge are not prefigured givens that constrain cross-cultural understanding, but dynamic platforms for learning that are tractable to concerted efforts over time to transform them. In doing so, these thinkers point us beyond the mere acknowledgement of cultural difference toward reform of the social, institutional and disciplinary spaces in which the production of knowledge takes place.
6 Books in one! Boost your DSLR photography skills with this amazing book When you're investing in top-notch camera equipment, it's also time to build top-notch photography skills that help you create the stunning images you see in your mind. This book gets you started on the path to capturing incredible photos of life's most precious moments. Cut through the jargon and techspeak as you get down to the essentials of taking control of your powerful camera and leaving the days of washed-out and blurry photos behind. 6 Books Inside... Review digital photography basics and camera controls Get the right lens for the shot Take creative control of exposure settings Shed some light on your subject Perfect the picture with editing Follow recipes for portraits, landscapes, close-ups, and action shots
Mercenary King Chen Qingyang returned to the city to protect his comrade's sister. the goddess. In the bustling city, Chen Qingyang was like a fish in water, carefree and at ease. And to see how the previous generation's soldiers would use their iron fists and wits to build a business empire...