This book chronicles the Kyoto/Kansai 1980s hardcore punk scene through the album Don't Be Swindle by S.O.B., with a focus on Kyoto's main venues and the networks they created.Apart from being the center of Japan's cultural heritage, Kyoto is home to one of Japan's leading avant-garde art and music scenes. The Kyoto University-affiliated venue Seibu Kodo has historically been the focus of this scene, creating an ethos and organizational core which hosted m...

With the outbreak of war in 1914, an estimated 30,000 German civilians in African and Asian colonies were violently uprooted and imprisoned. Britain's First World War internment of German settlers seriously challenged the structures that underpinned nineteenth-century imperialism. Through its analysis of this internment, this book highlights the impact that the First World War had on the notion of a common European 'civilising mission' and the image of empire in the early twentieth century...

Which role did East Asia play in the First World War? How did East Asian commentators see and interpret the »total(izing) war« in Europe and elsewhere? Which lessons did they draw from this experience for their own societies? How did economic networks shift? Which influence did the war have on East Asian visions of world order? This volume aims to introduce new scholarship, in many cases by hitherto untranslated East Asian authors. It is part of a larger movement in current historiography ...

“A monumental new volume. . . . Revelatory, even revolutionary. . . . Clark has done a masterful job explaining the inexplicable.” — Boston GlobeOne of The New York Times Book Review’s 10 Best Books of the Year • Winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize (History)Historian Christopher Clark’s riveting account of the explosive beginnings of World War I.Drawing on new schol...

A history of the Chinese experience in WWII, named a Book of the Year by both the Economist and the Financial Times: "Superb" ( The New York Times Book Review).In 1937, two years before Hitler invaded Poland, Chinese troops clashed with Japanese occupiers in the first battle of World War II. Joining with the United States, the Soviet Union, and Great Britain, China became the fourth great ally in a devastating struggle for its very surviv...

Explore Japanese society in the lively series that collects the best new writing, photography, art, and reportage from around the world.Visitors from the West look with amazement, and sometimes concern, at Japan's social structures and unique, complex culture industry; the gigantic scale of its tech corporations and the resilience of its traditions; the extraordinary diversity of the subcultures that flourish in its "post-human" megacities. The cou...

From the bestselling author of The Ascent of Money and The Square and the Tower"Even those who have read widely in 20th-century history will find fresh, surprising details." —The Boston Globe"A fascinating read, thanks to Ferguson's gifts as a writer of clear, energetic narrative history." —The Washington PostAstonishing in its scope and erudition, this is the magnum opus that Nia...

**AN INSTANT NATIONAL BESTSELLERThe definitive history of twenty-first-century indie rock—from Iron & Wine and Death Cab for Cutie to Phoebe Bridgers and St. Vincent—and how the genre shifted the musical landscape and shaped a generation**Maybe you caught a few exhilarating seconds of “Teen Age Riot” on a nearby college radio station while scanning the FM dial in your parents’ car. Maybe your friend invited you to a shabby local rock club and you ended up having a religious...

From a bestselling historian, a daringly revisionist history of World War I.“A rich and provocative book, evocative and heartbreaking.” — AtlanticThe Pity of War makes a simple and provocative argument: the human atrocity known as the Great War was entirely England’s fault. According to Niall Ferguson, England entered into war based on naive assumptions of German aims, thereby transforming a Continental co...

A portrayal of how and why Japan waged war from 1931-1945 and what life was like for the Japanese people in a society engaged in total war.

Ecstasy did for house music what LSD did for psychedelic rock. Now, in Energy Flash, journalist Simon Reynolds offers a revved-up and passionate inside chronicle of how MDMA (ecstasy”) and MIDI (the basis for electronica) together spawned the unique rave culture of the 1990s.England, Germany, and Holland began tinkering with imported Detroit techno and Chicago house music in the late 1980s, and when ecstasy was added to the mix in British clubs, a new music subculture was...

King of Prussia, German Emperor, war leader and defeated exile, Kaiser Wilhelm II was one of the most important - and most controversial - figures in the history of twentieth-century Europe. But how much power did he really have?The acclaimed historian Christopher Clark follows Kaiser Wilhelm's political career from his youth at the Hohenzollern court through the turbulent decades of the Wilhelmine era into global war and the collapse of Germany in 1918, to his last days. He asks: ...