bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Josef Von Sternberg
Authors: Studlar Gaylyn
Published: June 2013

Born in Vienna, Austria in 1894 of working-class Jewish parents, Jonas Stern’s downtrodden young life did not hold the slightest indication that, as Josef von Sternberg, he would become one of the greatest visual stylists in the history of Hollywood filmmaking. His family settled permanently in the United States in 1908. After he finished school, he worked repairing film sprockets. During World War I, he enlisted in the Signal Corps to make training films, an experience that helped him get a minor foothold in the East Coast movie industry after the war. He flirted with building a career in Europe, but returned to the United States and moved to Hollywood. His first feature was The Salvation Hunters (1925), shot outdoors near the port of San Pedro and independently financed. It drew the attention of Charles Chaplin, who became the producer of von Sternberg’s next film, The Sea Gull, which ended in disaster—destroyed as a tax write-off. He was asked by Paramount to finish Children of Divorce (1927) when its director quit, which he did, marking his first work with this studio. He is credited with creating the first modern gangster film with his next assignment, Underworld (1927). Other important films followed at Paramount, but the thing that von Sternberg is best remembered for and, indeed, which was emphasized in his obituaries in 1969, was that he “discovered” Marlene Dietrich and cast her in The Blue Angel (1930), a Paramount/Ufa coproduction shot in Germany. Their six subsequent films together at Paramount in the early 1930s were not always popular or critically praised, but their visual beauty was indisputable, and they shaped the image of Dietrich as a star persona. Fired from Paramount in 1935 as a director because his difficult personality made him as unpopular with actors and technical talent as his films had become with audiences, von Sternberg was forced to go from studio to studio, and ultimately from country to country, to find work, until there was none for him. Yet, even at the time when he was regarded as a “has-been” by Hollywood, appreciation for his talents was nursed by experimental filmmakers and surrealists who praised him as a film stylist capable of creating stunning cinematic worlds with no equivalent in reality. In the 1960s he was elevated by a generation of auteur critics who regarded him as an exemplar of a filmmaker who imprints his work with his personality. In the 1970s, interest by scholars like Robin Wood and Laura Mulvey sparked a reconsideration of the erotic and ideological complexity of von Sternberg’s films, especially those starring Dietrich. Subsequently, writers focusing on cultural history and film theory have reframed the director’s films within considerations of gender, nation, race, and class, even as interest in narrative complexity, performance, and visual style is asserted in critical discourse.
Buster Keaton
Authors: Wolfe Charles
Published: June 2013

The silent films of Buster Keaton (b. 1895–d. 1966) are among the most critically admired American motion pictures of the pre-sound era. Born to traveling medicine show performers during a stopover in a small town in Kansas, Joseph Frank “Buster” Keaton spent his early years on the road, and as a young child he gained star status as the linchpin of the family’s vaudeville act. He made his debut in motion pictures in 1917 as a member of Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle’s company, Comique Films, where he first gained training as comedy filmmaker. From 1920 to 1928 Keaton worked independently and prolifically, supervising and starring in nineteen comedy shorts and ten features, a body of work that remains at the heart of his screen reputation today. Although he never enjoyed the box-office clout of rivals Charlie Chaplin and Harold Lloyd, Keaton’s resilient, sober-faced persona was familiar to movie audiences around the world, and he was second only to Chaplin as the object of critical efforts to define the distinct contributions of slapstick comedy to the nascent art of the screen. Keaton’s career entered a tailspin in the early 1930s—the result of a troubled marriage, struggles with alcoholism, and the loss of control over his films—but he recovered his footing by the end of the decade and worked steadily as a performer and comic consultant in movies, television, and theater until his death. An aging Keaton was occasionally the recipient of nostalgic tributes to the “golden years” of slapstick comedy during these years. A great tide of critical reappraisals of Keaton’s work, however, followed the restoration and revival of his silent films, many of which Keaton himself thought lost, in an effort spearheaded by Raymond Rohauer, who mounted Keaton retrospectives in the 1960s, first in Europe then the United States. Showcasing Keaton’s silent film work as a whole, these screenings were accompanied by a growing critical consensus that an artist of the first rank had been rediscovered. In recent years, video and digital technologies have made Keaton’s films available to an expanding audience of fans, critics, historians, and independent researchers. The annotated bibliography that follows provides a roadmap to Keaton scholarship, including reference guides, biographies, and overviews, and the books and articles through which a critical understanding of Keaton’s cinema has taken shape.
The Searchers
Authors: Studlar Gaylyn
Published: June 2013

Since the 1970s, The Searchers, directed by John Ford, has become one of the most discussed films of 1950s US cinema. A story of captivity and revenge set in post–Civil War Texas, The Searchers is now regarded as one of the best films ever made, although it received mixed reviews upon its original release. The film’s artistic reputation did not rise until the early 1970s, buoyed by auteur critics like Andrew Sarris and Peter Bogdanovich and by film school–trained directors like Martin Scorsese and Steven Spielberg, who paid homage to The Searchers in their own movies. An important trend in scholarship coalesced around the film’s depiction of fear of miscegenation, with literary antecedents illuminated by June Namias, Barbara Mortimer, and Richard Slotkin. A significant number of considerations of The Searchers focus on Ethan Edwards, the psychologically complex Indian hater played by John Wayne. Many film scholars address the film’s relationship to genre, with Edward Buscombe and Peter Cowie calling attention to the film’s debt to pre-cinematic visual representations of the frontier. Gaylyn Studlar and Hubert I. Cohen emphasize the film’s break from western conventions. Major biographies of John Ford by Scott Eyman, Joseph McBride, and Tag Gallagher provide insight into the film’s production history, as does Glenn Frankel. Analysis of The Searchers has been sustained by many academic scholars who are not film specialists, by literary critics such as Jane Tompkins; political scientists such as Robert Pippin; Native American studies scholars such as Tom Grayson Colonnese and Cristine Soliz; philosophers such as Richard A. Gilmore; feminist critics such as Susan Courtney; historians, including James F. Brooks; and classicists, such as Martin M. Winkler and James Clauss. In spite of the variety of methodological approaches applied, the literature on The Searchers often seems to follow the nonlinear trajectory of the film’s own narrative with a retreading of familiar terrain.
Religion and Film
Authors: Lindvall Terry
Published: June 2013

In 1911 one of the earliest documents examining the nature and function of cinema came from the Reverend Herbert A. Jump of Connecticut, a pamphlet entitled The Religious Possibilities of the Motion Picture. His thoughtful reflections on the novel medium envisioned a fertile marriage between the moving pictures and the church, leading to revival and reform. However, his work was practical and apologetic, particularly to a readership that would soon divide over whether the moving pictures were a handmaiden to theology or the devil’s camera. His work followed a presentation of ideas in the periodical The Congregationalist, indicating that the pioneering work done in the two disciplines of religion and film came from the more entrenched queen of the sciences, from theologians and clerics. Directors such as the Methodist D. W. Griffith waxed on eloquently about the eschatological “universal language” of the cinema, and Vachel Lindsay poetically mused on film’s spiritual aspects as “photoplays of religious splendors.” Perhaps the first filmmaker/critic to articulate the religious aspects of the moving picture was French critic Jean Epstein, who in the 1920s described the effect of the image to intensely affect, transport, and transform spectators, offering an “essentially supernatural” experience. Nevertheless, religious writers dominated the publications in this area, with the first flood of publications coming in the 1970s. Only recently, with the work of Nolan, Hendershot, and others, would scholars in film theory and history contribute to the conversation. The following sections map out both historical and conceptual perspectives.
Film Comedy
Authors: Fischer Lucy
Published: June 2013

Film comedy is a ubiquitous form of cinema, present from the medium’s earliest days with little “mischief joke” movies such as the Lumière brothers’ L’arroseur arrosé (1895) in which the “hoser gets hosed.” Comedies were popular not only in turn-of-the- century France but also in the United States, with Thomas Alva Edison producing shorts such as A Wringing Good Joke (1899) in which a boy ties his grandfather’s chair to the wringer of a washer and mayhem ensues. While some consider comedy a film genre, it is such a broad category that others liken it to a mode (e.g., melodrama) that itself is divided into various genres: romantic comedy, satire, parody, and the like. Comic movies were popular throughout the silent era, with the first major stars being comedians (for instance, Charlie Chaplin or Max Linder). While much of the humor was physical and slapstick (pies in the face, people falling down, and machines run amuck), more sophisticated works were soon produced by directors such as Ernst Lubtisch and Cecil B. Demille—who adapted comedies of manners (about high society, romance, marriage, and divorce) to the screen. Parodies were also soon produced as when Buster Keaton made Three Ages (1923), a send up of D. W. Griffith’s Intolerance (1916). With the coming of sound, the nexus of comedy shifted to the vocal register with performers imported from Broadway, radio, or the vaudeville circuit. Hence, cinema saw the appearance of fast-talking performers such as the Marx Brothers, mumbling comics such as W. C. Fields, and sexually suggestive dames such as Mae West. With sound came the expansion of romantic comedy (in which sexual repartee substituted for lovemaking) as well as the development of other genres more consonant with dialogue: screwball, satire, and parody. With comedy’s coming of age in the cinema, new themes and perspectives emerged: although in the early days, women were frequently butts of the joke (for instance, the characters played by Margaret Dumont in the Marx Brothers films), in more contemporary times they became forceful comediennes (for instance Roseanne). While at the 20th century’s dawn ethnic minority characters were often maliciously stereotyped, beginning in the later 20th century, they would become comic heroes in their own right (as Eddie Murphy or Woody Allen did). All the genres pioneered in the first days of film history remain vibrant today (including slapstick) and the range of comic forms remains emphatically international.
French Revolution
Authors: Belissa Marc
Published: June 2013

The French Revolution is not a strictly national phenomenon confined within the boundaries of the kingdom of France. On the one hand, it is part of a chain of revolutionary movements in Europe (such as the Belgian, Liège, Genevan, and Batavian revolutions); on the other hand, it has a universal and cosmopolitan dimension that was immediately clear to all contemporaries. Finally, because France was a central actor within the diplomatic European order at the end of the eighteenth century, its revolution was bound to have important consequences on western European geopolitics (and also in America due to its colonies) and on the law of nations, as it was commonly admitted as well. The revolutionary decade (1789–1799) witnessed a twofold evolution: First, the debates on the rights of nations became increasingly present in the writings of philosophers, jurists, and legislators, and also in the public sphere, through the press, theater, images, and the like. Second, “regenerated France” proclaimed its intention to rethink to reform the law of nations by making the principle of popular sovereignty a normative one. But, as France was also involved in diplomatic relations of the time, revolutionary France was also obliged to get along with the rules and treaties of the ancien régime. This resulted in a permanent contradiction between the proclaimed principles and the obligation to deal with the kings and princes of Europe. This contradiction has often been interpreted in black-and-white terms: principles versus realpolitik. In the early twentieth century, a neo-Kantian interpretation insisted on the radicalness of the proclamation of revolutionary principles within the sphere of the law of nations, while a “realist” interpretation (in the international relations theories sense) defended, on the contrary, the idea that revolutionary principles were merely a form of justification of the spirit of conquest proper to France. If this dispute has not disappeared from current interpretations, academic works of the end of the twentieth century and of the beginning of the twenty-first century try to understand how revolutionaries sought to reconcile universal brotherhood and national interest.
Mona Caird
Authors: Surridge Lisa
Published: June 2013

The feminist novelist and essayist Mona Caird (b. 1854–d. 1932) was propelled to fame in the summer of 1888 when her Westminster Review essay “Marriage” became the focus of the great marriage debate in the Daily Telegraph. When the newspaper posed the question, “Is Marriage a Failure?,” twenty-seven thousand respondents weighed in. Caird, however, had not asked whether marriage was a failure; she had stated unequivocally that it was one. A married women herself, she argued that marriage should be conceptualized not in terms of duty or sacrifice, but as a contract freely entered into by equals and dissolvable at the will of the parties. Her views were attacked by those who accused her of “balderdash” and by those who punned that “no one Caird”; indisputably, however, she had touched a raw nerve, as the sheer volume of correspondence indicated. During the late 1880s and throughout the 1890s, Caird developed in essays her views on marriage, the family, and gender relations. Delving into histories of past societies, she argued for the constructed nature of gender relations, citing historical examples of women’s rule, power, and inheritance. Writing in the post-Darwinian era, Caird was deeply disturbed by the implications of contemporary debates about evolution and the future of the race. She fought against contemporary eugenicists, defended women’s right to use birth control, and argued that the race would evolve not by the right of might, but by cultivating compassion and adhering to principles of freedom and individual rights. From the mid-1890s forward, such principles led her to an antivivisectionist stance; presciently, she warned against justifying experiments by social gain, arguing that if such eugenic principles were accepted, the rights of the weak would be imperiled. During World War I, she wrote against brute force as a means of social progress, advocating instead education, international communication, and travel as a means of fostering global citizens. A deeply original thinker, Caird was also an experimental novelist, recognized in 1894 by the Review of Reviews as a founder of a new genre, the “Modern Woman novel” (what would later be called the “New Woman” novel). Experimenting with form, imagery, mythography, and temporality, Caird created novels that are aesthetic forms in their own right, not mere dramatizations of her political principles. Since the 1990s, feminist scholarship has hailed Caird’s achievements as new woman essayist, novelist, historiographer, and anti-eugenic feminist, placing her work in relation to contemporary debates on gender, sexuality, and eugenics. While Caird’s biography remains shadowy, her writings have come into the scholarly light.
Nathaniel Hawthorne
Authors: Martin Michael , Coale Samuel
Published: June 2013

Unlike Dickinson, Melville, and Thoreau, who are now viewed as classic American authors, Nathaniel Hawthorne and his work were never completely ignored by the public and various critics. Hawthorne (b. 1804–d. 1864)—was born Nathaniel Hathorne in Salem, Massachusetts, and came from a long line of farmers and sailors. His most notorious ancestor was John Hathorne, a judge at the Salem witch trials in 1692, which helps explain his constant struggle with the Calvinistic sense of determinism and tragic fate in his fiction. He married Sophia Peabody in 1842 and sought and accepted political appointments to the custom house in Boston and Salem and finally as consul to Liverpool, England, as a result of his campaign biography of President Franklin Pierce, a fellow Bowdoin graduate. He spent a twelve-year apprenticeship in his mother’s family’s home (1825–1837)—his father died when he was four—writing short stories, sketches, and essays, which led to his romantic legend as a hermit and recluse. Success came with The Scarlet Letter in 1850 and went on to include The House of the Seven Gables (1851), The Blithedale Romance (1852), and The Marble Faun (1860) as well as collections of his short fiction and Our Old Home (1863). Early on, critics wrestled with the relationship between his genteel style and his “morbid” subjects, biographers creating either a very pragmatic Hawthorne or a reclusive ghost. The New Critics delved into the psychological and proto-theological themes in his work and trumpeted his use of contradiction, paradox, and the polarized perspectives of his characters, thus concentrating on such tales as “The Minister’s Black Veil” and “My Kinsman, Major Molineux” at the expense of the popular ones in his lifetime, such as “Little Annie’s Ramble,” “A Rill from the Town Pump,” and “Sunday at Home.” Friends such as Elizabeth Peabody and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow consistently praised his work, as did other writers such as Edgar Allan Poe (at first he praised and then disparaged it as too allegorical and thin) and Herman Melville. Criticism has always emphasized the dualisms in his work—good and evil, men and women, and Puritanism and romanticism—as well as his often contradictory responses to such historical issues as the Civil War, abolitionism, feminism, and the delicate political compromises, which upheld the status quo between North and South, of the 1850s. After his four-year stint in Liverpool, he traveled extensively in Italy and returned to Concord, Massachusetts, in 1860.
Marianne Moore
Authors: Levy Ellen
Published: June 2013

“Everything is worthless but the best and this is the best,” William Carlos Williams said of the poetry of Marianne Moore (b. 1887–d. 1972) in The Dial, though “only,” he warned, “with difficulty discerned” (p. 310). Moore’s brand of modernist difficulty won her the admiration of peers such as Williams, H.D., T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, and Wallace Stevens and has exercised a powerful influence on later poets from Hart Crane to Elizabeth Bishop and John Ashbery. However, her poems, composed of sinuous Jamesian sentences tightly encased in Moore’s signature syllabic stanzas and packed with citations from a dizzying array of sources high and low, have, as Williams suspected, proven a challenge to less discerning readers. “Critical curiosity, which has fussed over so many twentieth-century pages, has tended to leave Miss Moore’s poems approvingly uninvestigated,” Hugh Kenner lamented in 1963 in Poetry (102.2, p. 115), and although the situation has improved since then, Moore remains understudied relative to her achievement and influence. Born in 1887 and raised in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, by her brilliant, pious mother, Moore never knew her father, who had a breakdown and left the family shortly before her birth. Mother, daughter, and Marianne’s brother, Warner, came to form an extraordinarily close unit, with its own private language and etiquette, and Moore’s writing would be marked by this hermetic family style. In the years after her graduation from Bryn Mawr in 1909, Moore’s poems were rejected by the mainstream publications to which she first sent them, but by the mid-1910s her terse, spiky verses had begun to appear in modernist little magazines like The Egoist, Poetry, and Others. In 1918, Moore moved with her mother to New York City, where her presence on the scene in Greenwich Village accelerated her success. Moore became especially closely associated with the influential journal The Dial, publishing her book, Observations (1924), with the Dial Press, receiving the Dial Prize in 1925, and taking up the magazine’s editorship in that same year, a job she held until it folded in 1929. Selected Poems (1935), edited by T. S. Eliot, included much of the strong, politically charged work Moore published in the early 1930s and solidified her reputation with the cognoscenti, but it was her Collected Poems (1951), which won the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award, that finally gained the poet a wider readership. By the end of the 1950s, in a strange twist of fate, the notably esoteric and eccentric Moore had become a much-photographed celebrity, America’s favorite spinster aunt, a role she inhabited almost until her death in New York in 1972.
Self-Esteem
Authors: Zeigler-Hill Virgil , Jordan Christian , Cameron Jessica J.
Published: June 2013

Self-esteem is one of the most widely studied topics in psychology with thousands of publications concerning how individuals feel about themselves. This exceptionally diverse literature has examined numerous issues surrounding self-esteem, including its potential causes, consequences, and correlates. Despite the considerable empirical attention devoted to self-esteem, there are important issues that require additional attention from scholars, such as the structure of self-esteem, group differences in self-esteem, the connection of self-esteem to important life outcomes, and the heterogeneous nature of self-esteem. It is important to note that self-esteem is most often considered to be a dimensional construct, with “low self-esteem” and “high self-esteem” representing the ends of a continuum. For ease of explanation, researchers often refer to individuals with relatively low scores on measures of self-esteem as possessing “low self-esteem,” and to those with relatively high scores as possessing “high self-esteem.” This convention is followed throughout this article.
Predator-Prey Interactions
Authors: Roth II Timothy C. , Thaker Maria
Published: June 2013

All animals are either predators or prey and, in most cases, they are both. The interactions involved in attempting to eat and avoid being eaten have strong and wide-reaching influences across all facets of ecology, from individual phenotypic responses and population dynamics, to community interactions, and even to how we attempt to manage and conserve the natural world. As in many subfields of ecology, the science behind predator-prey investigations has been driven by theory, including important advances in generating and testing predictions. This article highlights the breadth of influence that predator-prey interactions have on ecology. The sections that follow address the effects of predator-prey interactions, such as those at the individual level, expressed through behavior, morphology, physiology, and life history, as well as their effects on population dynamics and community composition. At the individual level, the predator-prey interaction will be arranged in two perspectives: those of the predator and those of the prey. The article also considers the less typical and more integrative aspects of predator-prey interactions, such as their physiological and neurological mechanisms and their relevance for questions associated with conservation. In addition, this article will consider the validity of including parasitism and herbivory within the broad definition of predation. A great deal of debate is ongoing as to whether these two ecological interactions possess similar enough qualities with predation to be characterized as one phenomenon. Those sections of this article will cover this debate and provide the reader with resources with which to consider this question.
Religion and Ecology
Authors: Tucker Mary Evelyn , Grim John , Trapani Tara C. , Snavely Leah , Powell Russell , Riley Matthew T.
Published: June 2013

Religious or spiritual ecology refers to attitudes, values, and practices regarding nature within the world’s religions and outside of those traditions. Religious or spiritual ecology identifies ways of interacting with nature that inspire human responses of respect, protection, and appropriate uses of nature. This bibliography highlights the literature in the field of study called “religion and ecology.” This field is in dialogue with other approaches to environmental studies from the social sciences, such as social ecology, political ecology, cultural ecology, industrial ecology, and ecological economics. This field began with the Harvard conference series on Religions of the World and Ecology at the Harvard Center for the Study of World Religions from 1996 to 1998. During this period and in the ensuing years, historians of religion and theologians began a process of retrieving, reevaluating, and reconstructing religious traditions in light of the growing environmental crisis. This humanistic study of ways of valuing nature, being in harmony with nature, and of ethically protecting nature is seen as a complement to the empirical investigation of nature from a scientific perspective. This work has been fostered by the Yale Forum on Religion and Ecology. The field of religious or spiritual ecology has several approaches including: (1) identifying theological approaches to nature within the world’s religions traditions; (2) intersecting with the earlier field of environmental ethics that arose from within Western philosophy; (3) highlighting practices for religious environmentalism on the ground; (4) responding to specific issues such as climate change, environmental justice, food security, biodiversity loss, and toxicities; and (5) drawing on the insights of artists and nature writers articulating the complexity of nature. This work in religious and spiritual ecology is opening up the field of religious studies to a broader understanding of what religion is and how it functions beyond Western categories of interpretation. Monotheism in its various Abrahamic forms does not exhaust the nature of religion. Thus we can now see religion through the lens of religious ecology as a way of orienting humans to the universe, grounding them in the community of nature and humans, nurturing them in Earth’s fecund processes, and transforming them into their deeper cosmological selves. This gives fresh meaning to the Latin term religio “to bind back,” which suggests a return to an awareness of and a commitment to the fundamental wellsprings of life.
Host-Parasitoid Interactions
Authors: Harvey Jeffrey A.
Published: June 2013

Insects are a highly diverse group due to their ability to exploit a wide range of niches. Each plant is attacked by multiple herbivores and these in turn may harbor a bewildering complexity of natural enemies, particularly parasitoids, which are often quite specialized in terms of the host species identity (and stage of attack) of their hosts. Furthermore, these parasitoids have their own parasitoids that attack them, meaning that food webs including these insects may go up to five trophic levels (or even more). Due to their diversity and strong link population dynamics, parasitoids comprise important aspects of ecological communities. Because of this and their potential as biocontrol agents, host-parasitoid dynamics have been a major focus of ecological and evolutionary study since the beginning of the 20th century.
East Asian Biomes
Authors: MacKinnon John
Published: June 2013

East Asian biomes include the major biological ecosystems that make up the land area of East Asia, specifically China with Taiwan, Mongolia, Japan, and the Korean Peninsula. These vary from northern tundra and boreal to southern tropical and subtropical ecosystems, include several major mountain ranges, and comprise forest ecosystems, grasslands, deserts, and also important wetland systems. One literally outstanding globally unique feature of the region is the Tibetan-Qinghai Plateau, which forms the source of many of Asia’s major rivers and also drives the monsoon climatic patterns of the entire region. The region includes the world’s most populated country, China, and some of the most densely populated areas but also some of the least populated areas of the planet, including Mongolia with the lowest density. The region is unusually rich in both flora and fauna and has many distinctive endemic features and relic species. The biome has been a great source of domesticated species and economically important species but faces severe conservation challenges as a result of rapid development and changing climate.
Israel Ba'al Shem Tov
Authors: Gellman Uriel
Published: June 2013

The 18th-century Polish-Jewish mystic, Israel ben Eliezer (b. c. 1700–d. 1760)—known widely as the Ba’al Shem Tov (Master of the Good Name), or by his acronym the Besht, is definitely one of the key figures in modern Jewish history. His character and his teachings inspired Hasidism—a social-religious movement that developed amongst Jews in Eastern Europe during the last decades of the 18th century, and is still vital within Jewish ultra-orthodoxy. The main scene of his activity was the Carpathians and the southeastern areas of the kingdom of Poland, especially the province of Podolia (now Ukraine). After a period of “concealment,” he began to function publicly (c. 1733) as a ba’al shem (shamanic healer), proficient in the use of “holy names,” and as a mystic possessing magical powers and bearing a new religious message. He finally settled in Międzybóż, an important commercial and communal center in the 1740s, where he was a respected member of the community, held a post as a ba’al shem, enjoyed a degree of prestige, and was admitted into the local circle of mystics. The Besht and a group of his associates formed a small group of pneumatic individuals who followed the distinctive religious lifestyle and customs of similar groups of Jewish mystics in 18th-century Europe. The Besht revealed his spiritual achievement and his mystical experiences to the members of this group, while, as a ba’al shem, he continued wandering and regarded himself a leader of the Jewish people. Fable and fact about the Besht’s life are so interwoven that modern historians have found it difficult to paint a coherent biography of this most influential figure. Many of the earlier assessments of his life and teachings have been challenged recently, and there are yet many more lacunae to be treated in future studies. The Besht’s importance as a historical figure is embedded not only in the Hasidic movement, in which he is seen as its founder or predecessor, but also in the ideological shift that took place within Jewish traditional society alongside Hasidism. Different ideological trends in modern times, like Jewish enlightenment or non-Hasidic rabbinic culture, were self-fashioned against the values and mores introduced by the Hasidic phenomenon.
Middle-Period China
Authors: Chaffee John
Published: June 2013

The Middle period (c. 100–1500 ce) occupies a special position in the history of China. Coming neither at the formative beginning of the imperial period nor at the end, when the imperial structures collapsed from stresses within and without the country, the Middle period was framed by the reunification of the empire in the 580s and the final chapter of the Mongol conquest in the 1270s and can lay claim both to one of the most expansive and brilliant of Chinese dynasties—the Tang—and the period of perhaps the greatest intellectual and socioeconomic dynamism and creativity—the Song. The modern study of the history of this period had its origins with Japanese scholars in the early 20th century—most notably Naito Kōnan (b. 1866–d. 1934)—who argued that the changes that occurred from the Tang to the Song dynasties were among the most fundamental in all of Chinese history and who pioneered in studies of the political, economic, and social structures of the period. Following World War II, many Euro-American and Taiwan scholars joined the Japanese in turning their attention to the period, attracted by the political successes and multicultural brilliance of the Tang and by the profound social, economic, and intellectual changes of the Song. To this mix has been added a host of historians in China, who, once they were liberated from a Marxist insistence on focusing on peasant uprisings, class struggles, and the like, proceeded with wide-ranging research and large-scale bibliographical and digitizing projects that have significantly increased the number and kinds of sources available to historians. The result of these activities has been to establish China’s Middle period as critically important in Chinese history, one that shaped many elements of the Late Imperial period intellectually, institutionally, and socially, and as a period of increasing interest to world historians.
Economic Reforms, 1978-Present
Authors: Huenemann Ralph W.
Published: June 2013

Between 1949 and 1976, under Mao Zedong’s 毛泽东 leadership, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) implemented socialist economic policies. In the 1950s, the central planning of industry (with an emphasis on heavy industry) was introduced, modeled on the five-year plans of the Soviet Union, and agriculture was collectivized. Following the collapse of the Great Leap Forward and the political split with Moscow, China’s economic policies in the 1960s and 1970s vacillated between Mao’s ultraleftist tendencies and more conventional socialist policies advocated by such leaders as Liu Shao-ch’i 刘少奇 and Deng Xiaoping 邓小平. Mao attacked his opponents for taking the capitalist road and largely succeeded in suppressing their proposed policies until his death in 1976. After Mao’s death, advocacy of various reforms became more acceptable. One important early sign of the new atmosphere was the announcement in 1977 that entrance examinations for China’s universities (which had been attacked and closed down during the Cultural Revolution) would be reestablished. Deng Xiaoping returned to power, and at the Third Plenum (of the Eleventh Central Committee of the CCP) in December 1978 the famous four-character policy gaige kaifang (改革开放), a reform of the economic system and an opening up to the outside world, was promulgated. Beyond the strong signal that the reforms were intended to remedy some of Mao’s mistakes, it was not clear exactly what the slogan would entail in practice. Indeed, even in the early 21st century the specifics of the reforms are still the subject of substantial disagreements within the CCP leadership. However, there can be no doubt that the reforms since 1978 generally have succeeded in both the system reform aspect, marked by the decollectivization of agriculture and the dismantling of Soviet-style central planning in industry, and the opening-up aspect, leading to China’s entry into the World Trade Organization (WTO) in 2001. It is also beyond doubt that the reforms have resulted in rapid economic growth (by the official statistics, an average annual growth of real gross domestic product of 9.7 percent between 1980 and 2009). However, it is also true that in the early 21st century many Chinese people remain desperately poor, and the reforms continue to be incomplete and controversial.
The Economy, 1949–1978
Authors: Perkins Dwight H.
Published: June 2013

The Chinese economy during the first three decades of rule by the Chinese Communist Party was organized in a fundamentally different way from that of market economies in much of the rest of the world and from what the Chinese economy became in the 21st century after three decades of market-oriented economic reform. Beginning in the mid-1950s, China introduced a centrally planned command economy patterned on that of the Soviet Union. This economic system involved the abolition of household agriculture in favor of collectives, first called “agricultural producer cooperatives” and, later, “Rural People’s Communes.” Industrial inputs and outputs were allocated by administrative means in accordance with a plan developed by the State Planning Commission, and market forces were largely eliminated in industry and large-scale commerce. Wages were set, and skilled workers were allocated to jobs by the government rather than by a labor market. Even many consumer goods were rationed, although some were allocated to households through the market; prices paid to farmers also played a limited role in government procurement of agricultural products. This highly centralized nonmarket, Soviet-type system, however, was introduced into the very different context of a developing country that was extremely poor. From the beginning, China’s leadership and that of Chinese Communist Party Chairman Mao Zedong, in particular, explored alternatives to these rigid central controls. The result of these explorations more often than not was economic disaster, leading to the 1959–1961 famine in which roughly thirty million people are believed to have died. The government and the leadership also pursued political goals, notably during the Cultural Revolution (1966–1976), that disrupted the economy and slowed economic growth. Economic studies during this period thus focused on how the economy was organized, how it made the transition from a market economy to a nonmarket command economy, and how the institutions and performance of this command economy performed in various periods. Describing the institutions was easier than measuring performance because, from 1958 to 1960, China published data that grossly exaggerated China’s economic performance. After 1960, given the reality of famine and a poorly performing economy more generally, the government simply stopped publishing statistical data on economic performance. Many analysts outside China thus had to piece together the data that did leak out, and much of their work managed to capture what was happening. The publication of increasing amounts of official data, beginning in 1979, filled in some of the gaps in the earlier literature. Most Chinese economists from 1949 through 1978 were expected to follow the government/party line at the time in anything they published; however, there were exceptions in which individual economists and officials stated views on economic matters that did not reflect the dominant government/party line.
Economy, 1895–1949
Authors: Wright Tim
Published: June 2013

The nature of the pre-Communist Chinese economy and the degree of its success, if any, at least up to the outbreak of war in 1937, are matters of some controversy, and these issues are closely linked to much broader debates on the relative merits of the market economy and economic planning. For a long time a “pessimistic” view held sway both in the West and, more particularly, in China, where it both fed into and was used as justification for the adoption of economic planning. Beginning in the 1980s a number of scholars, of whom Thomas G. Rawski has been the most influential, questioned many aspects of this perception. There was substantial if not rapid growth, even in agriculture, and some improvement in living standards, while the market served China and its population well. To an increasing extent, scholars both within and outside China have come to see the post–Mao Zedong economy as picking up many of the features of China’s market economy in the 1930s (e.g., family farms, family-based entrepreneurship, urban consumerism), while the planned economy between 1949 and 1978 is seen as at best an interlude and at worst an aberration. Although parts of this more “optimistic” position are now widely accepted, there are still major differences in emphasis among scholars. Intersecting with overall judgments on the success of the economy are a number of other controversies. Insofar as the economy is perceived as a failure, and growth, especially in agriculture, is seen to have been slower than it might have been, scholars differ on whether the main impediments were social and political (e.g., the role of the state, the impact of imperialism, the structure of rural society) or material and technological (population pressure and the slow take-up of modern technology). The foreign impact has been controversial in terms of both its magnitude and its nature (beneficial or harmful). Chinese entrepreneurship has been variously criticized for falling behind the ideal mandated by modernization theory and upheld as an example for contemporary Chinese managers seeking to escape the dictates of the planned economy. The Nationalist regime of 1927–1937 is seen variously as a predatory state whose activities were a major barrier to development or as a precursor to the planned economy under the Chinese Communist Party.
Late Imperial Economy, 960–1895
Authors: Wright Tim
Published: June 2013

Although for most purposes “late imperial China” refers to the Ming and Qing dynasties (1368–1911), many scholars believe that key aspects of China’s late imperial economy came into existence as a result of a series of changes that began in the late Tang dynasty and culminated during the Song dynasty, known as the “Tang-Song transformation.” While these changes included, for example, the growth of markets, they were by no means limited to—or even mainly related to—economic history but included political changes, such as those in the nature of the elite. Without prejudging the issue, this article covers the whole period from the establishment of the Song dynasty to the first Sino-Japanese War, after which railways and economic modernization began to change the Chinese economy. The old stereotype of premodern China as unchanging and economically stagnant has long been discarded, and scholars recognize that China had a dynamic and successful economy that managed to feed a growing population and developed a range of sophisticated institutions. The stereotype is now being turned on its head, and many are asking whether as late as the eighteenth century at least parts of China were as prosperous and as advanced as western Europe, whether Chinese commercial and legal institutions were as accommodating of economic growth as those in Europe, and, as a result, how one can explain the “great divergence” that took place between Europe and the rest of the world from (in this view) the early nineteenth century. A further underlying issue is to what extent models based on the European experience can be used to understand or explain development patterns in China. The most notable example of trying to force Chinese development into a European framework was of course Marxist stage theory. But more recently “Eurocentric” theories and models of development that are based on the European experience have been more widely rejected, coupled with attempts to develop more distinctively Chinese—or Asian—models.
Republican China, 1911–1949
Authors: Wright Tim
Published: June 2013

There have been major changes since the mid-twentieth century in the way in which the history of republican China (1911–1949) is conceptualized by scholars in the West and elsewhere. Up to the 1970s, scholarship was dominated by a somewhat teleological revolutionary paradigm, in which developments in republican China were seen predominantly in terms of their relationship to the 1949 revolution and thus, of their contribution to the total transformation of Chinese society. This teleological approach has more recently been challenged in at least two respects. First, scholars have affirmed that ideas and actions in Nationalist China are worthy of study in their own right, rather than merely in terms of the contribution they did or did not make to China’s Communist revolution. This was partly, though not exclusively, a reflection of the economic and, later, political success of Taiwan and the ethnically Chinese city-states outside the People’s Republic of China, which suggested that the Chinese past could generate paths other than those outlined by Mao Zedong. Second, the degree to which 1949 actually represented a radical break or complete transformation of Chinese society has come increasingly under question. Developments after 1949 have come more and more to be seen as the continuation of a process of state building that was under way, certainly, during the Nationalist regime of 1927–1949 and, to some extent, even before that, back to the warlords or even the late Qing. A further change, and one that reflects the emergence of postmodern views of history way beyond Chinese studies, is to downgrade metanarratives of all types (not just the revolutionary teleology) and to focus more on the local and the contingent. Local studies have therefore been a major trend in republican history since the 1990s. The field covered by this article is vast, and in order to reduce it to manageable size, the author has decided to concentrate mainly (though not exclusively) on topics linked to politics (though in the Chinese case many social, cultural, and economic developments had a strong political element, and they are touched on) and on works that focus centrally on the 1911–1949 period rather than, for example, the whole twentieth century.