Reconstructed World

Born in Leicester, England, and raised in a working-class family, Richardson emigrated to northern Manitoba in 1911. She was influential in the women's and peace movements in both countries. Devoutly religious, she challenged orthodoxy and worked outside the mainstream churches for peace and social justice. She cofounded one of the earliest suffrage groups in Manitoba and was a key activist in peace movements during the Boer War and World War I. She also served as an information centre for international antiwar news and ran an internationally focused women's peace crusade in World War I from her Manitoba farmhouse via the post and newspaper columns. Richardson was also a gifted writer and poet. She wrote on a variety of women's movement issues for British and Canadian newspapers and magazines, including Woman's Century, the magazine of the National Council of Women of Canada. Her outcries against war, her indictment of militarism, and her call for women and men to stand together for justice were powerful messages that still have resonance today. Tragically, poor health, both mental and physical, interfered with Richardson's work and prevented her from achieving the recognition attained by feminist contemporaries such as Nellie McClung.

Questions of survival and loss bedevil the study of early printed books. Many early publications are not particularly rare, but many have disappeared altogether. Here leading specialists in the field explore different strategies for recovering this lost world of print.

The World Religions Paradigm has been the subject of critique and controversy in Religious Studies for many years. After World Religions provides a rationale for overhauling the World Religions curriculum, as well as a roadmap for doing so. The volume offers concise and practical introductions to cutting-edge Religious Studies method and theory, introducing a wide range of pedagogical situations and innovative solutions. An international team of scholars addresses the challenges presented in their different departmental, institutional, and geographical contexts. Instructors developing syllabi will find supplementary reading lists and specific suggestions to help guide their teaching. Students at all levels will find the book an invaluable entry point into an area of ongoing scholarly debate.

This book looks at the impact multinational companies have in post-conflict environments, the role they have and how they are governed, drawing on detailed fieldwork in Azerbaijan, Bosnia and Rwanda.

Although some statesmen and historians have pinned Austria’s—and the world’s—interwar economic implosion on financial colonialism, in this corrective history Nathan Marcus deemphasizes the negative role of external players and points to the greater impact of domestic malfeasance and predatory speculation on Austrian political and financial decline.

In September 1923, a magnitude 7.9 earthquake devastated eastern Japan, killing more than 120,000 people and leaving two million homeless. Using a rich array of source material, J. Charles Schencking tells for the first time the graphic tale of Tokyo's destruction and rebirth. In emotive prose, he documents how the citizens of Tokyo experienced this unprecedented calamity and explores the ways in which it rattled people's deep-seated anxieties about modernity. While explaining how and why the disaster compelled people to reflect on Japanese society, he also examines how reconstruction encouraged the capital's inhabitants to entertain new types of urbanism as they rebuilt their world. Some residents hoped that a grandiose metropolis, reflecting new values, would rise from the ashes of disaster-ravaged Tokyo. Many, however, desired a quick return of the city they once called home. Opportunistic elites advocated innovative state infrastructure to better manage the daily lives of Tokyo residents. Others focused on rejuvenating society--morally, economically, and spiritually--to combat the perceived degeneration of Japan. Schencking explores the inspiration behind these dreams and the extent to which they were realized. He investigates why Japanese citizens from all walks of life responded to overtures for renewal with varying degrees of acceptance, ambivalence, and resistance. His research not only sheds light on Japan's experience with and interpretation of the earthquake but challenges widespread assumptions that disasters unite stricken societies, creating a "blank slate" for radical transformation. National reconstruction in the wake of the Great Kanto Earthquake, Schencking demonstrates, proved to be illusive.

Examining the southern memory of Reconstruction, in all its forms, is an essential element in understanding the society and politics of the twentieth-century South.