Free Download A Woman's Empire: Russian Women and Imperial Expansion in Asia
by Katya Hokanson
English | 2023 | ISBN: 1487545606 | 355 Pages | True PDF | 48 MB

Free Download Warmonger: Vladimir Putin's Imperial Wars by Alex J. Bellamy
English | September 28, 2023 | ISBN: 1788216466, 1788216474 | True PDF | 207 pages | 3.8 MB
Russia's invasion of Ukraine in 2022 was a war long in the making and is the latest in a series of military interventions that have showcased Vladimir Putin's deadly imperial ambitions and the ruthless and bloody strategies that serve his vision of a greater Russia. Putin's Russia wants its empire back and it has taken the events in Ukraine for the West to finally realize it.

Free Download Roman Imperial Texts: A Sourcebook By Mark Reasoner
2013 | 271 Pages | ISBN: 0800699114 | PDF | 4 MB
A selection of the most important sources for the cultural and political context of the early Roman Empire and the New Testament writings, Roman Imperial Texts includes freshly translated public speeches, official inscriptions, annals, essays, poems, and documents of veiled protest from the Empire's subject peoples all introduced by Mark Reasoner.

Free Download Reading Illustrated Fiction in Late Imperial China By Robert E. Hegel
1998 | 489 Pages | ISBN: 0804730024 | PDF | 36 MB
This work explores significant physical aspects of the printed book in late imperial China to reconstruct the changing assumptions with which Chinese popular novels were originally read from the sixteenth through nineteenth centuries. It focuses on the previously neglected areas of book format, varieties of illustrations and their significance, and the theory and practice of reading illustrated narratives.The author first considers the physical book itself, as a vehicle for reading and as an object for visual enjoyment, tracing the development of the format commonly used for popular reading materials, the blockprinted book in sewn volumes with illustrations. He describes the technological progress that made book production efficient and economical by the middle of the sixteenth century, and makes extensive comparisons between the physical characteristics of novels and books of more artistically refined content.The focus of the study then shifts to the illustrations that accompanied virtually all printed materials during the period when popular fiction became common. They are found to consist of a range of conventional elements that are related to images in more refined arts, such as the paintings of the literati and the decorations produced by commercial artists. Close parallels in both content and pictorial motifs between these various levels of painting and book illustrations suggest a continuum of the arts on which the pictures in mass-produced fiction initially held a respectable position.The final chapters assert, from a theoretical perspective, the function of illustrations in narratives as a guide or a hindrance to reading. The author demonstrates the correspondencebetween the later decline of fiction illustrations and the growth in reading audiences, explaining this connection as a function of flagging interest in pictures -- which often interfere with, rather than promote, the visualization so essential to reading for pleasure in other cultures as well.Throughout, the author incorporates findings from the history of technology, new explorations in the development of commerce in cultural objects, recent research on the commercial arts, and the latest theories of reading for pleasure to situate -- and explain -- the numerous changes in popular literary trends during the last several centuries of imperial Chinese rule.

Free Download Looking for the Other: Feminism, Film, and the Imperial Gaze By E. Ann Kaplan
1997 | 333 Pages | ISBN: 0415910161 | PDF | 18 MB
What happens when white people look at non-whites? What happens when the gaze is returned? Looking for the Other responds to criticisms leveled at white feminist film theory of the 1970s and 1980s for its neglect of issues to do with race. It focuses attention on the male gaze across cultures, as illustrated by women filmmakers of color whose films deal with travel. Looking relations are determined by history, tradition, myth; by national identity, power hierarchies, politics, economics, geographical and other environment. Travel implicitly involves looking at, and looking relations with, peoples different from oneself. Featured films include Birth of a Nation, The Cat People, Home of the Brave, Black Narcissus, Chocolat, and Warrior Marks. Featured filmmakers include D.W.Griffith, Jacques Tourneur, Michael Powell, Julie Dash, Pratibha Parmar, Trinh T. Min-ha, and Claire Denis.

Free Download Caroline Elkins, "Imperial Reckoning: The Untold Story of Britain's Gulag in Kenya"
English | 2005 | pages: 496 | ISBN: 0805080015 | EPUB | 2,1 mb
A major work of history that for the first time reveals the violence and terror at the heart of Britain's civilizing mission in Kenya

Free Download Anne Mcclintock, "Imperial Leather: Race, Gender, and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest"
English | ISBN: 0415908906 | | 464 pages | PDF | 21 MB
Imperial Leather chronicles the dangerous liaisons between gender, race and class that shaped British imperialism and its bloody dismantling. Spanning the century between Victorian Britain and the current struggle for power in South Africa, the book takes up the complex relationships between race and sexuality, fetishism and money, gender and violence, domesticity and the imperial market, and the gendering of nationalism within the zones of imperial and anti-imperial power.

Free Download Branches of Heaven: A History of the Imperial Clan of Sung China By John W. Chaffee
1999 | 441 Pages | ISBN: 0674080491 | PDF | 22 MB
By the end of the Sung dynasty (960-1279), known descendants of the three Chao brothers who had founded the dynasty numbered over 20,000. Unlike the rulers of many other Chinese dynasties, however, the Sung emperors were not plagued by challenges to their rule from their relatives. So successful was Sung policy on the imperial clan that it would serve as a model for the subsequent Ming and Ch'ing dynasties. How the Sung created a social and political asset in the imperial clan while neutralizing it as a potential threat is the story of this book. This study of the imperial clan as an institution analyzes the history, its political tile and the lifestyle of its members, focusing on their residence patterns, marriages and occupations.

Free Download Li Guo, "Women's Tanci Fiction in Late Imperial and Early Twentieth-Century China "
English | ISBN: 1557537135 | 2015 | 320 pages | EPUB | 10 MB
In Women's Tanci Fiction in Late Imperial and Early Modern China, Li Guo presents the first book-length study in English of women's tanci fiction, the distinctive Chinese form of narrative written in rhymed lines during the late imperial to early modern period (related to, but different from, the orally performed version also called tanci) She explores the tradition through a comparative analysis of five seminal texts. Guo argues that Chinese women writers of the period position the personal within the diegesis in order to reconfigure their moral commitments and personal desires. By fashioning a "feminine" representation of subjectivity, tanci writers found a habitable space of self-expression in the male-dominated literary tradition.Through her discussion of the emergence, evolution, and impact of women's tanci, Guo shows how historical forces acting on the formation of the genre serve as the background for an investigation of cross-dressing, self-portraiture, and authorial self-representation. Further, Guo approaches anew the concept of "woman-oriented perspective" and argues that this perspective conceptualizes a narrative framework in which the heroine (s) are endowed with mobility to exercise their talent and power as social beings as men's equals. Such a woman-oriented perspective redefines normalized gender roles with an eye to exposing women's potentialities to transform historical and social customs in order to engender a world with better prospects for women.

Free Download Imperial Cruise by James Bradley
English | November 8, 2010 | ISBN: 0316014001 | 400 pages | PDF | 10 Mb
In 1905 President Teddy Roosevelt dispatched Secretary of War William Howard Taft on the largest U.S. diplomatic mission in history to Hawaii, Japan, the Philippines, China, and Korea. Roosevelt's glamorous twenty-one year old daughter Alice served as mistress of the cruise, which included senators and congressmen. On this trip, Taft concluded secret agreements in Roosevelt's name.