In imperial China, intellectuals devoted years of their lives to passing rigorous examinations in order to obtain a civil service position in the state bureaucracy. This traditional employment of the literati class conferred social power and moral legitimacy, but changing social and political circumstances in the Ming (1368–1644) and Qing (1644–1911) periods forced many to seek alternative careers. Politically engaged but excluded from their traditional bureaucratic roles, creative writers authored critiques of state power in the form of fiction written in the vernacular language. In this study, Liangyan Ge examines the novels Romance of the Three Kingdoms, The Scholars, Dream of the Red Chamber (also known as Story of the Stone), and a number of erotic pieces, showing that as the literati class grappled with its own increasing marginalization, its fiction reassessed the assumption that intellectuals’ proper role was to serve state interests and began to imagine possibilities for a new political order.

"Lawrence Reddick (1910-1995) was among the most notable African American intellectuals of his generation. The second curator of the Schomburg Library and a University of Chicago PhD, Reddick helped spearhead Carter Woodson's black history movement in the 1930s, guide the Double Victory campaign during World War II, lead the Southern Christian Leadership Conference during the Cold War, mentor Martin Luther King Jr. throughout his entire public life, direct the Opportunities Industrialization Center Institute during the 1960s, and forcefully confront institutional racism within academia during the Black Power era. A lifelong Pan-Africanist, Reddick also fought for decolonization and black self-determination alongside Kwame Nkrumah, Nnamdi Azikiwe, Léopold Senghor, and W.E.B. Du Bois. Beyond participating in such struggles, Reddick documented and interpreted them for black and white publics alike"--

This is a rare study of a late premodern Islamic thinker, Ibrahim al- Bājūrī, a nineteenth-century scholar and rector of Cairo's al-Azhar University. Aaron Spevack explores al- Bājūrī's legal, theological, and mystical thought, highlighting its originality and vibrancy in relation to the millennium of scholarship that preceded and informed it, and also detailing its continuing legacy. The book makes a case for the normativity of the Gabrielian Paradigm, the study of law, rational theology, and Sufism, in the person of al- Bājūrī. Soon after his death in 1860, this typical pattern of scholarship would face significant challenges from modernists, reformers, and fundamentalists. Spevack challenges beliefs that rational theology, syllogistic logic, and Sufism were not part of the predominant conception of orthodox scholarship and shows this scholarly archetype has not disappeared as an ideal. In addition, the book contests prevailing beliefs in academic and Muslim circles about intellectual decline from the thirteenth through nineteenth centuries.

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Bartel Leendert van der Waerden made major contributions to algebraic geometry, abstract algebra, quantum mechanics, and other fields. He liberally published on the history of mathematics. His 2-volume work Modern Algebra is one of the most influential and popular mathematical books ever written. It is therefore surprising that no monograph has been dedicated to his life and work. Van der Waerden’s record is complex. In attempting to understand his life, the author assembled thousands of documents from numerous archives in Germany, the Netherlands, Switzerland and the United States which revealed fascinating and often surprising new information about van der Waerden. Soifer traces Van der Waerden’s early years in a family of great Dutch public servants, his life as professor in Leipzig during the entire Nazi period, and his personal and professional friendship with one of the great physicists Werner Heisenberg. We encounter heroes and villains and a much more numerous group in between these two extremes. One of them is the subject of this book. Soifer’s journey through a long list of archives, combined with an intensive correspondence, had uncovered numerous details of Van der Waerden’s German intermezzo that raised serious questions and reproaches. Dirk van Dalen (Philosophy, Utrecht University) Professor Soifer’s book implicates the anthropologists’ and culture historians’ core interest in the evolution of culture and in the progress of human evolution itself on this small contested planet. James W. Fernandez (Anthropology, University of Chicago) The book is fascinating. Professor Soifer has done a great service to the discipline of history, as well as deepening our understanding of the 20th century. Peter D. Johnson, Jr. (Mathematics, Auburn University) This book is an important contribution to the history of the twentieth century, and reads like a novel with an ever-fascinating cast of characters. Harold W. Kuhn (Mathematics, Princeton University) This is a most impressive and important book. It is written in an engaging, very personal style and challenges the reader’s ability of moral and historical judgment. While it is not always written in the style of ‘objective’ professional historiography, it satisfies very high standards of scholarly documentation. Indeed the book contains a wealth of source material that allows the reader to form a highly detailed picture of the events and personalities discussed in the book. As an exemplar of historical writing in a broader sense it can compete with any other historical book. Moritz Epple (History of Mathematics, Frankfurt University)

The era of modern economics emerged with the publication of Carl Menger?s seminal work, Principles of Economics, in 1871. In this slim book, Menger set forth the correct approach to theoretical research in economics and elaborated some of its immediate implications. In particular, Menger sought to identify the causal laws determining the prices that he observed being paid daily in actual markets.4 His stated goal was to formulate a realistic price theory that would provide an integrated explanation of the formation of market phenomena valid for all times and places.5 Menger?s investigations led him to the discovery that all market prices, wage rates, rents, and interest rates could ultimately be traced back to the choices and actions of consumers striving to satisfy their most important wants by ?economizing? scarce means or ?economic goods.? Thus, for Menger, all prices, rents, wage, and interest rates were the outcome of the value judgments of individual consumers who chose between concrete units of different goods according to their subjective values or ?marginal utilities? to use the term coined by his student Friedrich Wieser. With this insight was born modern economics.

After leading the world economy for a century, the United States faces the first real challenge to its supremacy in the rise of China. Is economic (or broader) conflict, well beyond the trade war that has already erupted, inevitable between the world’s two superpowers? Will their clash produce a new economic leadership vacuum akin to the 1930s when Great Britain abandoned its leadership role and a rising United States was unwilling to step in to save the global order? In this sweeping and authoritative analysis of the competition for global economic leadership between China and the United States, C. Fred Bergsten warns of the disastrous consequences of hostile confrontation between these two superpowers. He paints a frightening picture of a world economy adopting Chinese characteristics in which the United States, after Trump abdicated much of its role, engages in a self-defeating attempt to “decouple” from its rival. Drawing on more than 50 years of active participation as a policymaker and close observation as a scholar, Bergsten calls on China to exercise constructive global leadership and on the United States to reject a policy of containment, avoid a new Cold War and instead pursue “conditional competitive cooperation” to work with its allies and China to lead, rather than destroy, the world economy.