Middle Kingdom and Empire of the Rising Sun PDF Download

Author: June Teufel Dreyer
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0195375661
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 479

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Book Description
"Japan and China have been rivals for more than a millennium. Until the late nineteenth century, China was the more powerful, while Japan took the upper hand in the twentieth century. Now, China's resurgence has emboldened it as Japan perceives itself falling behind, exacerbating long-standing historical frictions ... Dreyer argues that recent disputes should be seen as manifestations of embedded rivalries rather than as issues whose resolution would provide a lasting solution to deep-standing disputes"--Jacket.

Author: June Teufel Dreyer
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN: 9780190692209
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 478

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Book Description
June Teufel Dreyer's Middle Kingdom and Empire of the Rising Sun provides an authoritative and accessible overview of the great civilizational rivalry between Japan and China. Dreyer sets the context by providing a crisp account of Sino-Japanese relations from the ninth century to the onset of the modern era. In the aftermath of multiple wars between them, including a long and brutal conflict in World War II, Japan developed into a major economic power but rejected any concomitant military capabilities. With the addition of a new epilogue, this paperback edition brings the narrative up to the present day and focuses on trade beginning to rise again after 2016. Dreyer focuses on the issues that dominate China and Japan's fraught current relationship including economic competition, resurgent nationalism, military tensions, and globalization. For anyone interested in the political dynamics of East Asia, this integrative history of the relationship between the region's two giants is essential reading.

Author: John Prados
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 0451414829
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 418

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Book Description
The Battle of Midway is traditionally held as the point when Allied forces gained advantage over the Japanese. In Islands of Destiny, acclaimed historian and military intelligence expert John Prados points out that the Japanese forces quickly regained strength after Midway and continued their assault undaunted. Taking this surprising fact as the start of his inquiry, he began to investigate how and when the Pacific tide turned in the Allies’ favor. Using archives of WWII intelligence reports from both sides, Prados offers up a compelling reassessment of the true turning in the Pacific: not Midway, but the fight for the Solomon Islands. Combat in the Solomons saw a series of surface naval battles, including one of the key battleship-versus-battleship actions of the war; two major carrier actions; daily air duels, including the aerial ambush in which perished the famous Japanese naval commander Admiral Yamamoto Isoroku; and many other hair-raising exploits. Commencing with the Allied invasion of Guadalcanal, Prados shows how and why the Allies beat Japan on the sea, in the air, and in the jungles.

Author: Samuel Wells Williams
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317949889
Category : Reference
Languages : en
Pages : 601

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Book Description
First published in 2009. This work by S. Wells Williams is a complete look at the Chinese Empire during the mid-nineteenth century. Subjects include the divisions of the Empire, geographical descriptions, religion and art, literature, the second war between Great Britain and China and social life among the Chinese. This is Volume one of two.

Author: Kenneth I. Friedman, Ph.d.
Publisher: CreateSpace
ISBN: 9781469902227
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 376

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Book Description
Using painstaking research and gifted insight, Dr. Kenneth I. Friedman, a talented and meticulous historian and writer, investigates the reasons why Imperial Japan declared war on the US, the British Empire, and other Western powers during World War II. Dr. Friedman's probing and in-depth analysis traces almost a century of US–Japan relations in this epic and stylish quest to provide a comprehensive and easy-to-read analysis offering detailed, historically accurate answers. The book begins with the arrival of American Commodore Matthew Perry in 1853, passes through the Meiji Restoration between 1868–1912, the Russo-Japanese War (ending in 1905 via the treaty signed at Theodore Roosevelt's “Summer White House” at Oyster Bay, Long Island), Japan's entry in World War I that ended with the Treaty of Versailles in 1919, the Japanese operational, strategic and tactical push into Northeast and Southeast Asia, and eventually heads through the clouds for the airstrike on Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, and thus usher in America's entry into a global war waxed rich with global aims. In his third book about World War II, Friedman crafts an historical narrative telling the story of Japan's march to an Armageddon that ended in fire and smoke. His sophisticated analysis captures the intrigues, drama, and geopolitical maneuvering which eventually led Japan to attack the US.The genesis of Dr. Friedman's analysis offers the true story of Japan as a star-crossed nation during its evolution from a country content to stay in its relatively peaceful isolation from the rest of the world to becoming a de facto world power on a collision course with destiny.Dawn of the Rising Sun addresses the Japanese reasons for attacking the Western Powers on December 7, 1941. Almost all of the analysis comes from the Japanese perspective. Various Japanese sources are used and explained to offer a broad cultural background and context. Conversations between Japanese and Western leaders have been based on source material in an effort to augment some of the most dramatic moments in world history. Taking a long-view of the emerging balance of power between Japan and America, Dr. Friedman focuses on the arrival of Perry and Harris in the 1850s, the downfall of the Shogunate rule ending in 1868, Japan making war with and defeating China at the end of the 19th Century, steadily disposing of Czarist Russia, and the awakening of the Japanese colonial spirit to see colonies overseas were the major events that propelled Japan to attacking the Americans. Japan felt she had missed out on her chance for global expansion, and, during the 1920s and 1930s, a militaristic tone permeated Japanese domestic and foreign policy in an effort to safeguard her imperialistic gains on the Asian continent. Cut off from oil by America, Japan believed it had no choice but to attack the Hawaiian Islands and other American, Dutch, and British possessions in the Western Pacific.The path of Japan from feudalism to a modern hyper power with state-of-the art weaponry is brought to life with stunning detail with more than fifty maps, charts, and graphics as well as numerous photographs. World War II drew Japan into an alliance with Nazi Germany and pushed Imperial Japanese forces into India and onto the fringes of Australia. Why did these events happen? Readers will continue turning the pages from one fabulous set of facts and intrigues to the next as Friedman hits yet another home run in his stunning troika of World War II works.

Author: Gregory Crouch
Publisher: Bantam
ISBN: 034553235X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 545

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Book Description
From the acclaimed author of Enduring Patagonia comes a dazzling tale of aerial adventure set against the roiling backdrop of war in Asia. The incredible real-life saga of the flying band of brothers who opened the skies over China in the years leading up to World War II—and boldly safeguarded them during that conflict—China’s Wings is one of the most exhilarating untold chapters in the annals of flight. At the center of the maelstrom is the book’s courtly, laconic protagonist, American aviation executive William Langhorne Bond. In search of adventure, he arrives in Nationalist China in 1931, charged with turning around the turbulent nation’s flagging airline business, the China National Aviation Corporation (CNAC). The mission will take him to the wild and lawless frontiers of commercial aviation: into cockpits with daredevil pilots flying—sometimes literally—on a wing and a prayer; into the dangerous maze of Chinese politics, where scheming warlords and volatile military officers jockey for advantage; and into the boardrooms, backrooms, and corridors of power inhabited by such outsized figures as Generalissimo and Madame Chiang Kai-shek; President Franklin Delano Roosevelt; foreign minister T. V. Soong; Generals Arnold, Stilwell, and Marshall; and legendary Pan American Airways founder Juan Trippe. With the outbreak of full-scale war in 1941, Bond and CNAC are transformed from uneasy spectators to active participants in the struggle against Axis imperialism. Drawing on meticulous research, primary sources, and extensive personal interviews with participants, Gregory Crouch offers harrowing accounts of brutal bombing runs and heroic evacuations, as the fight to keep one airline flying becomes part of the larger struggle for China’s survival. He plunges us into a world of perilous night flights, emergency water landings, and the constant threat of predatory Japanese warplanes. When Japanese forces capture Burma and blockade China’s only overland supply route, Bond and his pilots must battle shortages of airplanes, personnel, and spare parts to airlift supplies over an untried five-hundred-mile-long aerial gauntlet high above the Himalayas—the infamous “Hump”—pioneering one of the most celebrated endeavors in aviation history. A hero’s-eye view of history in the grand tradition of Lynne Olson’s Citizens of London, China’s Wings takes readers on a mesmerizing journey to a time and place that reshaped the modern world.

Author: S. C. Gwynne
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1416597158
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 394

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Book Description
*Finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award* *A New York Times Notable Book* *Winner of the Texas Book Award and the Oklahoma Book Award* This New York Times bestseller and stunning historical account of the forty-year battle between Comanche Indians and white settlers for control of the American West “is nothing short of a revelation…will leave dust and blood on your jeans” (The New York Times Book Review). Empire of the Summer Moon spans two astonishing stories. The first traces the rise and fall of the Comanches, the most powerful Indian tribe in American history. The second entails one of the most remarkable narratives ever to come out of the Old West: the epic saga of the pioneer woman Cynthia Ann Parker and her mixed-blood son Quanah, who became the last and greatest chief of the Comanches. Although readers may be more familiar with the tribal names Apache and Sioux, it was in fact the legendary fighting ability of the Comanches that determined when the American West opened up. Comanche boys became adept bareback riders by age six; full Comanche braves were considered the best horsemen who ever rode. They were so masterful at war and so skillful with their arrows and lances that they stopped the northern drive of colonial Spain from Mexico and halted the French expansion westward from Louisiana. White settlers arriving in Texas from the eastern United States were surprised to find the frontier being rolled backward by Comanches incensed by the invasion of their tribal lands. The war with the Comanches lasted four decades, in effect holding up the development of the new American nation. Gwynne’s exhilarating account delivers a sweeping narrative that encompasses Spanish colonialism, the Civil War, the destruction of the buffalo herds, and the arrival of the railroads, and the amazing story of Cynthia Ann Parker and her son Quanah—a historical feast for anyone interested in how the United States came into being. Hailed by critics, S. C. Gwynne’s account of these events is meticulously researched, intellectually provocative, and, above all, thrillingly told. Empire of the Summer Moon announces him as a major new writer of American history.

Author: Pankaj Mishra
Publisher: Doubleday Canada
ISBN: 0385676115
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 393

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Book Description
The Victorian period, viewed in the West as a time of self-confident progress, was experienced by Asians as a catastrophe. As the British gunned down the last heirs to the Mughal Empire, burned down the Summer Palace in Beijing, or humiliated the bankrupt rulers of the Ottoman Empire, it was clear that for Asia to recover a vast intellectual effort would be required. Pankaj Mishra's fascinating, highly entertaining new book tells the story of a remarkable group of men from across the continent who met the challenge of the West. Incessantly travelling, questioning and agonising, they both hated the West and recognised that an Asian renaissance needed to be fuelled in part by engagement with the enemy. Through many setbacks and wrong turns, a powerful, contradictory and ultimately unstoppable series of ideas were created that now lie behind everything from the Chinese Communist Party to Al Qaeda, from Indian nationalism to the Muslim Brotherhood. Mishra allows the reader to see the events of two centuries anew, through the eyes of the journalists, poets, radicals and charismatics who criss-crossed Europe and Asia and created the ideas which lie behind the powerful Asian nations of the twenty-first century.

Author: Odd Arne Westad
Publisher: Basic Books
ISBN: 0465029361
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 544

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Book Description
As the twenty-first century dawns, China stands at a crossroads. The largest and most populous country on earth and currently the world's second biggest economy, China has recently reclaimed its historic place at the center of global affairs after decades of internal chaos and disastrous foreign relations. But even as China tentatively reengages with the outside world, the contradictions of its development risks pushing it back into an era of insularity and instability—a regression that, as China's recent history shows, would have serious implications for all other nations. In Restless Empire, award-winning historian Odd Arne Westad traces China's complex foreign affairs over the past 250 years, identifying the forces that will determine the country's path in the decades to come. Since the height of the Qing Empire in the eighteenth century, China's interactions—and confrontations—with foreign powers have caused its worldview to fluctuate wildly between extremes of dominance and subjugation, emulation and defiance. From the invasion of Burma in the 1760s to the Boxer Rebellion in the early 20th century to the 2001 standoff over a downed U.S. spy plane, many of these encounters have left Chinese with a lingering sense of humiliation and resentment, and inflamed their notions of justice, hierarchy, and Chinese centrality in world affairs. Recently, China's rising influence on the world stage has shown what the country stands to gain from international cooperation and openness. But as Westad shows, the nation's success will ultimately hinge on its ability to engage with potential international partners while simultaneously safeguarding its own strength and stability. An in-depth study by one of our most respected authorities on international relations and contemporary East Asian history, Restless Empire is essential reading for anyone wishing to understand the recent past and probable future of this dynamic and complex nation.

Author: Wendy Christensen
Publisher: Infobase Publishing
ISBN: 1604131608
Category : Egypt
Languages : en
Pages : 161

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Book Description
Presents a clear, detailed picture of the life and history of the ancient Egyptians. Explains why religion played such an important part in Egyptian politics, who stood atop the Egyptian social pyramid, what games Egyptian children played, and why Egypt eventually succumbed to the Roman Empire, as well as its connections to the modern world.