scholarly journals A late Wisconsin (32-10k cal a BP) history of pluvials, droughts and vegetation in the Pacific south-west United States (Lake Elsinore, CA)

2018 ◽  
Vol 33 (2) ◽  
pp. 238-254 ◽  
Author(s):  
M. E. Kirby ◽  
L. Heusser ◽  
C. Scholz ◽  
R. Ramezan ◽  
M. A. Anderson ◽  
...  
Author(s):  
Annelise Heinz

Mahjong: A Chinese Game and the Making of Modern American Culture illustrates how the spaces between tiles and the moments between games have fostered distinct social cultures in the United States. When this mass-produced game crossed the Pacific it created waves of popularity over the twentieth century. Mahjong narrates the history of this game to show how it has created a variety of meanings, among them American modernity, Chinese American heritage, and Jewish American women’s culture. As it traveled from China to the United States and caught on with Hollywood starlets, high society, middle-class housewives, and immigrants alike, mahjong became a quintessentially American pastime. This book also reveals the ways in which women leveraged a game for a variety of economic and cultural purposes, including entrepreneurship, self-expression, philanthropy, and ethnic community building. One result was the forging of friendships within mahjong groups that lasted decades. This study unfolds in two parts. The first half is focused on mahjong’s history as related to consumerism, with a close examination of its economic and cultural origins. The second half explores how mahjong interwove with the experiences of racial inclusion and exclusion in the evolving definition of what it means to be American. Mahjong players, promoters, entrepreneurs, and critics tell a broad story of American modernity. The apparent contradictions of the game—as both American and foreign, modern and supposedly ancient, domestic and disruptive of domesticity—reveal the tensions that lie at the heart of modern American culture.


Author(s):  
Elizabeth Sinn

This chapter takes a broad look at the Pacific Ocean in relation to Chinese migration. As trade, consumption and capital flows followed migrants, powerful networks were woven and sustained; in time, the networks fanned across the Pacific from British Columbia along the West Coast of the United States to New Zealand and Australia. The overlapping personal, family, financial and commercial interests of Chinese in California and those in Hong Kong, which provide the focus of this study, energized the connections and kept the Pacific busy and dynamic while shaping the development of regions far beyond its shores. The ocean turned into a highway for Chinese seeking Gold Mountain, marking a new era in the history of South China, California, and the Pacific Ocean itself.


2001 ◽  
Vol 35 (1) ◽  
pp. 217-244
Author(s):  
XIXIAO GUO

Late 1946 was a time of anticlimax in the history of Sino-American relations. For four years since the outbreak of the Pacific War, thousands of American servicemen had been in China rubbing shoulders with the Chinese. When victory finally came, more United States troops (mainly the marines of the Third Amphibious Corps) poured in, and the Chinese hailed them as heroes. In less than a year, however, as hostilities between the Kuomintang (KMT) and the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) closed in, the Americans were caught in the crossfire. Along the communication lines in North China, armed clashes between US and CCP forces escalated; in the cities, anti-American rallies became daily occurrences. The Chinese now became hostile to its erstwhile allies; wherever US servicemen went, they received boos from the locals. The rupture seemed to be irreversible: US forces started to evacuated, George Marshall, the presidential envoy to China, also ended his yearlong mediation, thus bringing the extraordinary intercourse between the two nations to an anticlimactic conclusion.


2014 ◽  
Vol 21 (1) ◽  
pp. 5-33
Author(s):  
Mark E. Caprio

The first Americans to arrive in Korea following Japan’s surrender at the end of World War II brought with them a quartet of Korean soldiers that U.S. officials had recruited for the Eagle Project, the most ambitious American effort to use Koreans in the Pacific War that punctuated a long wartime effort to enlist Allied diplomatic and military support for overseas Koreans. In response, U.S. officials had insisted that Korean exiles in the United States unify their efforts. This condition referenced squabbles among Korean groups in general, with the most transparent being those between Syngman Rhee and Haan Kilsoo. While Korean combatants on the Asian mainland managed to gain some U.S. support for their cause, recognition of their potential came too late in the war for them to help liberate their country. Ultimately, the United States turned to the Japanese and Japanese-trained Koreans to assist in this occupation. Reviewing the history of both Korean lobbying and U.S. response to it provides the opportunity to ask whether better handling of the Korean issue during World War II could have provided U.S. occupation forces with better circumstances to prepare southern Korea for a swift, and unified, independence.


2015 ◽  
Vol 12 (3) ◽  
pp. 855-862 ◽  
Author(s):  
P. E. Kauppi ◽  
R. A. Birdsey ◽  
Y. Pan ◽  
A. Ihalainen ◽  
P. Nöjd ◽  
...  

Abstract. Large trees are important and unique organisms in forests, providing ecosystem services including carbon dioxide removal from the atmosphere and long-term storage. Some reports have raised concerns about the global decline of large trees. Based on observations from two regions in Finland and three regions in the United States we report that trends of large trees during recent decades have been surprisingly variable among regions. In southern Finland, the growing stock volume of trees larger than 30 cm at breast height increased nearly five-fold during the second half of the 20th century, yet more recently ceased to expand. In the United States, large hardwood trees have become increasingly common in the Northeast since the 1950s, while large softwood trees declined until the mid 1990s as a consequence of harvests in the Pacific region, and then rebounded when harvesting there was reduced. We conclude that in the regions studied, the history of land use and forest management governs changes of the diameter-class distributions of tree populations. Large trees have significant benefits; for example, they can constitute a large proportion of the carbon stock and affect greatly the carbon density of forests. Large trees usually have deeper roots and long lifetimes. They affect forest structure and function and provide habitats for other species. An accumulating stock of large trees in existing forests may have negligible direct biophysical effects on climate through transpiration or forest albedo. Understanding changes in the demography of tree populations makes a contribution to estimating the past impact and future potential of forests in the global carbon budget and to assessing other ecosystem services of forests.


1977 ◽  
Vol 11 (2) ◽  
pp. 257-291 ◽  
Author(s):  
K. C. Chan

The Marco Polo Bridge Incident on 7 July 1937 has been commonly regarded as the beginning of the second Sino-Japanese war. The early days of the war were a history of rapid Japanese advances and, inversely, of the equally fast retreat of the Chinese. The Chinese Nationalist Government evacuated Nanking and moved westward to the Wuhan area in late November 1937. Central China soon became untenable in face of heavy Japanese reinforcements; the Chinese government again evacuated in October 1938, this time much further west to Chungking in Szechwan. There was no declaration of war and China clearly had the sympathy of Britain and the United States. The two countries continued to recognize the government at Chungking, under the leadership of Chiang Kai-shek, as the government of China, despite the fact that it retained control only over the south-west corner of the country. Pearl Harbor strengthened the tie of relations; the Chungking government won Britain, the United States, and the Netherlands as allies in its colossal struggle against Japan.


2016 ◽  
Vol 23 (3) ◽  
pp. 229-256
Author(s):  
K. Ian Shin

Interest in Chinese art has swelled in the United States in recent years. In 2015, the collection of the late dealer-collector Robert Hatfield Ellsworth fetched no less than $134 million at auction (much of it from Mainland Chinese buyers), while the Metropolitan Museum of Art drew over 800,000 visitors to its galleries for the blockbuster show “China: Through the Looking Glass”—the fifth most-visited exhibition in the museum’s 130-year history. The roots of this interest in Chinese art reach back to the first two decades of the 20th Century and are grounded in the geopolitical questions of those years. Drawing from records of major collectors and museums in New York and Washington, D.C., this article argues that the United States became a major international center for collecting and studying Chinese art through cosmopolitan collaboration with European partners and, paradoxically, out of a nationalist sentiment justifying hegemony over a foreign culture derived from an ideology of American exceptionalism in the Pacific. This article frames the development of Chinese art as a contested process of knowledge production between the United States, Europe, and China that places the history of collecting in productive conversation with the history of Sino-American relations and imperialism.


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