Search results for ""Author Brett L. Walker""

While in the ICU with a near-fatal case of pneumonia, Brett Walker was asked, “Do you have a family history of illness?”—a standard and deceptively simple question that for Walker, a professional historian, took on additional meaning and spurred him to investigate his family’s medical past. In this deeply personal narrative, he constructs a history of his body to understand his diagnosis with a serious immunological disorder, weaving together his dying grandfather’s sneaking a cigarette in a shed on the family’s Montana farm, blood fractionation experiments in Europe during World War II, and nineteenth-century cholera outbreaks that ravaged small American towns as his ancestors were making their way west. A Family History of Illness is a gritty historical memoir that examines the body’s immune system and microbial composition as well as the biological and cultural origins of memory and history, offering a startling, fresh way to view the role of history in understanding our physical selves. In his own search, Walker soon realizes that this broader scope is more valuable than a strictly medical family history. He finds that family legacies shape us both physically and symbolically, forming the root of our identity and values, and he urges us to renew our interest in the past or risk misunderstanding ourselves and the world around us.

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This model monograph is the first scholarly study to put the Ainu - the native people living in Ezo, the northernmost island of the Japanese archipelago - at the center of an exploration of Japanese expansion during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the height of the Tokugawa shogunal era. Inspired by 'new Western' historians of the United States, Walker positions Ezo not as Japan's northern 'frontier' but as a borderland or middle ground. By framing his study between the cultural and ecological worlds of the Ainu before and after two centuries of sustained contact with the Japanese, the author demonstrates with great clarity just how far the Ainu were incorporated into the Japanese political economy and just how much their ceremonial and material life - not to mention disease ecology, medical culture, and their physical environment - had been infiltrated by Japanese cultural artifacts, practices, and epidemiology by the early nineteenth century. Walker takes a fresh and original approach. Rather than presenting a mere juxtaposition of oppression and resistance, he offers a subtle analysis of how material and ecological changes induced by trade with Japan set in motion a reorientation of the whole northern culture and landscape. Using new and little-known material from archives as well as Ainu oral traditions and archaeology, Walker poses an exciting new set of questions and issues that have yet to be approached in so innovative and thorough a fashion.

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William Smith Clark was in Hokkaido for only eight months but, as John Maki's fascinating biography shows, his influence has endured. A Yankee in Hokkaido places Clark's appointment to oversee the creation of the Sapporo Agricultural College within the context of the Meiji era's drive to modernize and Westernize Japan and to settle the island of Hokkaido. Maki recounts how Clark inspired his Japanese contemporaries with an idealistic vision of the future born in the United States of the late nineteenth century; with agricultural expertise and pedagogical initiatives; and with his devotion to the moral development of his students—men who would later number among the leaders of modern Japan. The work also offers the reader an intimate portrait of this extraordinary citizen of Massachusetts from childhood through Civil War action to the founding and running of the Massachusetts Agricultural College, known today as the University of Massachusetts at Amherst.

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