In general, “development” denotes movement or growth toward something better in the future. International development—widespread in the decades following World War II—was an effort at purposeful changein landscapes around the world. Contributors to this volume argue that these projects constituted an effort to transplant modernity, such as knowledge or technology, from places seen as more developed to places perceived as un- or underdeveloped. During its heyday, international development included not just dams, roads, health programs, and agricultural projects but also animal husbandry schemes, urban development, and wildlife protection plans. Projects often succeeded or failed because of existing environmental conditions, and in turn, these programs remade—or tried to remake—the land, water, wildlife, and people around them. From American-directed failures in water engineering in Afghanistan to the impact of livestock epidemics on economic growth in East Africa, the chapters in Transplanting Modernity question how science, technology, and faith in Western notions of progress have influenced the pace, scope, and scale of development.

This dissertation explores how modern journalism took shape in "semi-colonial" China in the early twentieth century, with a focus on the influence of the American model of professional journalism. This work presents a methodological model that combines discourse analysis and social network analysis. Discourse analysis shows how early Chinese Confucian-liberal intellectuals seized upon, and selectively drew upon, American ideas of journalistic professionalism in the larger quest of national modernization. Social network analysis examines the roles played by the complex networks and interactions among intellectuals, educators, and journalists from China and the United States in the introduction of the American model of journalism. Situating the cultural transfer in China's semi-colonial condition and its urge for modernization, this project reveals how the colonial encounters created American-inspired but distinctly indigenous notions of modern journalism in early twentieth-century China.

This book focuses on the rise of sharing and collaboration practices among peers in Spanish digital cultures and social movements in the wake of Spain's financial meltdown of 2008.

As the Year 2024 has already passed half, I sincerely hope and pray for world peace and for people to live and work in peace. But looking ahead, I believe the future will still not be peaceful. The Russian-Ukrainian war is still raging, and the people are suffering. The Israeli-Hamas conflict seems to have no signs of stopping, and the US election is surging. As I said before, the three major divisions facing the world are presented at the same time this year: the Russian-Ukrainian war is a major division between the democratic and dictatorial camps, the US election is a major left-right division, and the Israeli-Hamas conflict has surpassed the left-right division and the democracy-dictatorship division. Is the world heading for doomsday ？ We wait and see.

Human and animal lives intersect, whether through direct physical contact or by inhabiting the same space at a different time. Environmental humanities scholars have begun investigating these relationships through the emerging field of multispecies studies, building on decades of work in animal history, feminist studies, and Indigenous epistemologies. Contributors to this volume consider the entangled human-animal relationships of a complex multispecies world, where domesticated animals, wild animals, and people cross paths, creating hybrid naturecultures. Technology, they argue, structures how animals and humans share spaces. From clothing to cars to computers, technology acts as a mediator and connector of lives across time and space. It facilitates ways of looking at, measuring, moving, and killing, as well as controlling, containing, conserving, and cooperating with animals. Sharing Spaces challenges us to analyze how technology shapes human relationships with the nonhuman world, exploring nonhuman animals as kin, companions, food, transgressors, entertainment, and tools.

Transplantation Gothic is a shadow cultural history of transplantation, as mediated through medical writing, science fiction, life writing and visual arts in a Gothic mode, from the nineteenth-century to the present. The works explore the experience of donor/suppliers, recipients and practitioners, and simultaneously express transfer-related suffering and are complicit in its erasure. Examining texts from Europe, North America and India, the book resists exoticising predatorial tissue economies and considers fantasies of harvest as both product and symbol of structural ruination under neoliberal capitalism. In their efforts to articulate bioengineered hybridity, these works are not only anxious but speculative. The book will be of interest to academics and students researching Gothic studies, science fiction, critical medical humanities and cultural studies of transplantation.

Winner of the George Perkins Marsh Prize Winner of the Stuart L. Bernath Prize Winner of the W. Turrentine Jackson Award Winner of the British Association of American Studies Prize “Extraordinary...Deftly rearranges the last century and a half of American history in fresh and useful ways.” —Los Angeles Review of Books “A smart, original, and ambitious book. Black demonstrates that the Interior Department has had a far larger, more invasive, and more consequential role in the world than one would expect.” —Brian DeLay, author of War of a Thousand Deserts When considering the story of American power, the Department of the Interior rarely comes to mind. Yet it turns out that a government agency best known for managing natural resources and operating national parks has constantly supported America’s imperial aspirations. Megan Black’s pathbreaking book brings to light the surprising role Interior has played in pursuing minerals around the world—on Indigenous lands, in foreign nations, across the oceans, even in outer space. Black shows how the department touted its credentials as an innocuous environmental-management organization while quietly satisfying America’s insatiable demand for raw materials. As presidents trumpeted the value of self-determination, this almost invisible outreach gave the country many of the benefits of empire without the burden of a heavy footprint. Under the guise of sharing expertise with the underdeveloped world, Interior scouted tin sources in Bolivia and led lithium surveys in Afghanistan. Today, it promotes offshore drilling and even manages a satellite that prospects for Earth’s resources from outer space. “Offers unprecedented insights into the depth and staying power of American exceptionalism...as generations of policymakers sought to extend the reach of U.S. power globally while emphatically denying that the United States was an empire.” —Penny Von Eschen, author of Satchmo Blows Up the World “Succeeds in showing both the central importance of minerals in the development of American power and how the realities of empire could be obscured through a focus on modernization and the mantra of conservation.” —Ian Tyrrell, author of Crisis of the Wasteful Nation

The year 1908 was not remarkable by most accounts, but it was an auspicious year for journalism. As newspapers sought to recover from big-city yellow journalism and circulation wars that reached their boiling point a few years earlier during the Spanish-American War, press clubs began to champion higher education. And schools dedicated to journalism education, led by the University of Missouri, began to emerge. Now sanctioned by universities, journalism could teach acceptable behavior and establish credentials. It was nothing less than the birth of a profession. Journalism—1908 opens a window on mass communication a century ago. It tells how the news media in the United States were fundamentally changed by the creation of academic departments and schools of journalism, by the founding of the National Press Club, and by exciting advances that included early newsreels, the introduction of halftones to print, and even changes in newspaper design. Journalism educator Betty Houchin Winfield has gathered a team of well-known media scholars, all specialists in particular areas of journalism history, to examine the status of their profession in 1908: news organizations, business practices, media law, advertising, forms of coverage from sports to arts, and more. Various facets of journalism are explored and situated within the country’s history and the movement toward reform and professionalism—not only formalized standards and ethics but also labor issues concerning pay, hours, and job differentiation that came with the emergence of new technologies. This overview of a watershed year is national in scope, examining early journalism education programs not only at Missouri but also at such schools as Colgate, Washington and Lee, Wisconsin, and Columbia. It also reviews the status of women in the profession and looks beyond big-city papers to Progressive Era magazines, the immigrant press, and African American publications. Journalism—1908 commemorates a century of progress in the media and, given the place of Missouri’s School of Journalism in that history, is an appropriate celebration of that school’s centennial. It is a lode of information about journalism education history that will surprise even many of those in the field and marks a seminal year with lasting significance for the profession.

This book focuses on the history and work of the Saudi Dār al-Iftā, one of the most central modern Islamic official religious institutions. The study was undertaken from two perspectives: (1) Dār al-Iftā creation, power structure, functions and the sociopolitical environment in which it operates; and (2) The actual work of this institution, mainly the mechanisms by which modern Saudi state muftis cope with clashes between Wahhābī idealism and the reality of an evolving society. This is a critical work which updates the readers' grasp of contemporary law and society in the modern Saudi state, in particular, and in Islamic jurisprudence in general.

"Practicing law" has a dual meaning in this book. It refers to both the occupational practice of law and the practicing of transplanted laws and institutions to perfect them. The book constitutes the first monographic work on the legal history of Republican Beijing, and provides an in-depth and comprehensive account of the practice of law in the city of Beijing during a period of social transformation. Drawing upon unprecedented research using archived records and other primary materials, it explores the problems encountered by Republican Beijing’s legal practitioners, including lawyers, policemen, judges and criminologists, in applying transplanted laws and legal institutions when they were inapplicable to, incompatible with, or inadequate for resolving everyday legal issues. These legal practitioners resolved the mismatch, the author argues, by quite sensibly assimilating certain imperial laws and customs and traditional legal practices into the daily routines of the recently imported legal institutions. Such efforts by indigenous legal practitioners were crucial in, and an integral part of, the making of legal transplantation in Republican Beijing. This work not only makes significant contributions to scholarship on the legal history of modern China, but also offers insights into China’s quest for modernization in its first wave of legal globalization. It is thus of great value to legal historians, comparative legal scholars, specialists in Chinese law and China studies, and lawyers and law students with an interest in Chinese legal history.