A Laughable Empire

A Laughable Empire
Author: Todd Nathan Thompson
Publisher: Penn State Press
Total Pages: 245
Release: 2023-03-14
Genre: History
ISBN: 0271096624

In the nineteenth-century United States, jokes, comic anecdotes, and bons mots about the Pacific Islands and Pacific Islanders tried to make the faraway and unfamiliar either understandable or completely incomprehensible (i.e., “other”) to American readers. A Laughable Empire examines this substantial archival corpus, attempting to make sense of nineteenth-century American humor about Hawai‘i and the rest of the Pacific world. Todd Nathan Thompson collects and interprets these comic, sometimes racist depictions of Pacific culture in nineteenth-century American print culture. Drawing on an archive of almanac and periodical humor, sea yarns, jest books, and literary comedy, Thompson demonstrates how jokes and humor functioned sometimes in the service of and sometimes in resistance to US imperial ambitions. Thompson also includes Indigenous voices and jokes lampooning Americans and their customs to show how humor served as an important cultural contact zone between the United States and the Pacific world. He considers how nineteenth-century Americans and Pacific Islanders alike used humor to employ stereotypes or to question them, to “other” the unknown or to interrogate, laughingly, the process by which “othering” occurs and is disseminated. Incisive and detailed, A Laughable Empire documents American humor about Pacific geography, food, dress, speech, and customs. Thompson sheds new light not only on nineteenth-century America’s imperial ambitions but also on its deep anxieties.

A Laughable Empire

A Laughable Empire
Author: Todd Nathan Thompson
Publisher: Penn State University Press
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2023
Genre: American wit and humor
ISBN: 9780271095042

Explores humor and satire as a comic contact zone between the United States and the Pacific world from 1840 to 1890. Considers how nineteenth-century Americans and Pacific Islanders used humor to employ stereotypes or to question them.

Empire

Empire
Author: D. C. B. Lieven
Publisher: Yale University Press
Total Pages: 536
Release: 2002-01-01
Genre: History
ISBN: 9780300097269

Focusing on the Tsarist and Soviet empires of Russia, Lieven reveals the nature and meaning of all empires throughout history. He examines factors that mold the shape of the empires, including geography and culture, and compares the Russian empires with other imperial states, from ancient China and Rome to the present-day United States. Illustrations.

Empires On The Pacific

Empires On The Pacific
Author: Robert S. Thompson
Publisher: Basic Books
Total Pages: 472
Release: 2002-12-18
Genre: History
ISBN: 9780465085767

Empires on the Pacific smashes the standard narrative of World War II in the Pacific theater, showing America's aim to replace Britain as East Asia's New Imperial Power. Robert Smith Thompson offers a long overdue explanation of what America's war against Japan was really about--in a word: China. The over-reaching British Empire was waning yet unwilling to relinquish its foothold in China, while an increasingly ambitious Japan was determined to dominate the region by conquering China. Enter the young upstart, America. For Franklin Delano Roosevelt and for the United States, the war with Japan had little to do with revenge for Pearl Harbor. Japan would have to be vanquished so that it would never again be an imperial rival.Thompson's recasting of the Asian conflict profoundly alters our understanding of World War II in the Pacific and of what followed in Korea and in Vietnam. Revisionist history at its best, Empires on the Pacific is a far-reaching book that requires us to re-evaluate what we thought we knew about twentieth-century American history and what many still consider our last "good war."

Cosmopolitanism and Empire

Cosmopolitanism and Empire
Author: Myles Lavan
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 297
Release: 2016
Genre: Art
ISBN: 0190465662

Cosmopolitanism and Empire traces the development of cosmopolitan cultural techniques through which ancient empires managed difference in order to establish regimes of domination. Its case studies of Near Eastern and Mediterranean empires combine to demonstrate the centrality of cosmopolitanism to the establishment and endurance of trans-cultural political orders.

AGENT of the Gentle Empire with New Technology

AGENT of the Gentle Empire with New Technology
Author: Jonathon Barbera
Publisher: iUniverse
Total Pages: 305
Release: 2005-03
Genre:
ISBN: 0595347193

The Gentle Empire and the insectoid hive mind are metaphors for the division and factionalism found in modern society and culture. From 1740 through 2144, the Gentle Empire drops its repetitive payloads of new technological wonders and corresponding propaganda values. Television takes center stage for a time and then it's replaced with robots and holographic projections. Finally, virtual reality makes actual reality obsolete! The competing alien empires will have to make the ultimate sacrifice and succeed against the odds even though both sides are so equally matched. Who will win? It truly could go either way. Will agents Zippity and Zappity succeed with their propaganda mission to win over the Earth or will they be thwarted by the insectoid hive mind? (This is the third volume in the Media Armageddon trilogy that began with Gorgeous Robot Flesh and The Next Paradigm for Human Living. The events in this volume occur simultaneously with the events of the previous two volumes. The three volumes can be read in any order.)

Wizard Emperor

Wizard Emperor
Author: Wei Han
Publisher: Funstory
Total Pages: 939
Release: 2020-09-20
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 1636547664

Three thousand years of glory, dust and earth, eight thousand miles of journey; Yun and Yue! Soldiers in the battlefield, Magi feared by the world. Carrying the honor and prosperity of the Gong Yang family, would Li Mu choose to avenge his family or to stay loyal to the dying empire? The dead are gone, where is the living?! Shaman spirits were gradually awakening along with the growth of this young man, and when the Shaman who was above the power level had once again stepped onto the stage of history, he asked the whole world, who could compete against him?! My name is Li Mu, and I'm from Witch Prefecture. I'm a low-level martial practitioner of the True Martial University.

Empire's New Clothes

Empire's New Clothes
Author: Paul Street
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 288
Release: 2015-12-03
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1317260554

As Obama nears the middle of his first-term as president Paul Street assesses his performance against the expectations of his supporters. While mainstream journalists have noted discrepancies between Obama's original vision and reality, Paul Street uniquely measures Obama's record against the expectations of the truly progressive agenda many of his supporters expected him to follow. Taken together, the list of Obama's weakened policies is startling: his business-friendly measures with the economy, the lack of support for the growing mass of unemployed and poor, the dilution of his health reform agenda, the passage of a record-setting Pentagon budget, and escalation of US military violence in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, and Somalia. Street's account reveals these and many other indications of how deeply beholden Obama is to existing dominant domestic and global hierarchies and doctrines.

The Last Empire

The Last Empire
Author: Serhii Plokhy
Publisher: Basic Books
Total Pages: 522
Release: 2015-09-08
Genre: History
ISBN: 0465097928

The New York Times bestselling author of The Gates of Europe offers “a stirring account of an extraordinary moment” in Russian history (Wall Street Journal) On Christmas Day, 1991, President George H. W. Bush addressed the nation to declare an American victory in the Cold War: earlier that day Mikhail Gorbachev had resigned as the first and last Soviet president. The enshrining of that narrative, one in which the end of the Cold War was linked to the disintegration of the Soviet Union and the triumph of democratic values over communism, took center stage in American public discourse immediately after Bush's speech and has persisted for decades -- with disastrous consequences for American standing in the world. As prize-winning historian Serhii Plokhy reveals in The Last Empire, the collapse of the Soviet Union was anything but the handiwork of the United States. Bush, in fact, was firmly committed to supporting Gorbachev as he attempted to hold together the USSR in the face of growing independence movements in its republics. Drawing on recently declassified documents and original interviews with key participants, Plokhy presents a bold new interpretation of the Soviet Union's final months, providing invaluable insight into the origins of the current Russian-Ukrainian conflict and the outset of the most dangerous crisis in East-West relations since the end of the Cold War. Winner of the Lionel Gelber Prize Winner of the Pushkin House Russian Book Prize Choice Outstanding Academic Title BBC History Magazine Best History Book of the Year

Empire's Edge

Empire's Edge
Author: Scott L. Malcolmson
Publisher: Verso
Total Pages: 276
Release: 1995-10-17
Genre: Travel
ISBN: 9781859840986

This travel book explores the forgotten countries on the edge of the new Europe—Romania, Bulgaria, Turkey and Uzbekistan. Mixing anecdote and reportage with history and legend, Malcomson teases out the long-running tensions between nation and empire, whether Roman, Byzantine, Ottoman or European. By the author of Tutarani: A Political Journey in the Pacific Islands.