A dramatic new telling of the dawn of modern East Asia, placing Korea at the center of a transformed world order wrought by imperial greed and devastating wars. In the nineteenth century, Russia participated in two “great games”: one, well known, pitted the tsar’s empire against Britain in Central Asia. The other, hitherto unrecognized but no less significant, saw Russia, China, and Japan vying for domination of the Korean Peninsula. In this eye-opening account, brought to life in lucid narrative prose, Sheila Miyoshi Jager argues that the contest over Korea, driven both by Korean domestic disputes and by great-power rivalry, set the course for the future of East Asia and the larger global order. When Russia’s eastward expansion brought it to the Korean border, an impoverished but strategically located nation was wrested from centuries of isolation. Korea became a prize of two major imperial conflicts: the Sino-Japanese War at the close of the nineteenth century and the Russo-Japanese War at the beginning of the twentieth. Japan’s victories in the battle for Korea not only earned the Meiji regime its yearned-for colony but also dislodged Imperial China from centuries of regional supremacy. And the fate of the declining tsarist empire was sealed by its surprising military defeat, even as the United States and Britain sized up the new Japanese challenger. A vivid story of two geopolitical earthquakes sharing Korea as their epicenter, The Other Great Game rewrites the script of twentieth-century rivalry in the Pacific and enriches our understanding of contemporary global affairs, from the origins of Korea’s bifurcated identity—a legacy of internal politics amid the imperial squabble—to China’s irredentist territorial ambitions and Russia’s nostalgic dreams of recovering great-power status.
Milbank and Mitchell, dissimilar in size and separated by more than two hundred miles, have more in common than might appear at first glance. In the first half of the twentieth century towns such as Milbank and Mitchell formed hubs for commerce, social activities, and culture. Eric Fowler and Sheila Delaney looked at their communities from different viewpoints, but their childhood and young adult memories of South Dakota share common themes.
When Benjamin Franklin flew his kite in a thunderstorm in his famous experiment, his illegitimate son William was his only companion. Together they traveled through the western wilds of Pennsylvania during the French and Indian War, fought in the colony's fractious political battles. Ben helped his son attain the post of Royal Governor of New Jersey, and William's government hired Ben to represent the colony in London. But when war came, father and son were split: one acclaimed as a patriot hero, the other a loyalist condemned by his countrymen. In William Franklin, Sheila Skemp tells the story of this fascinating and complex man, a man with a foot in both worlds--he loved both King and country, and saw the interests of both as inextricably intertwined. She follows William's early years as a militia officer in the wars with the French, his life as a law student in England, and his long tenure as Royal Governor of New Jersey. Skemp highlights the close personal and political relationship between father and son, depicting such ironic episodes as William's defense of his father against charges that Ben was the author of the infamous Stamp Act. But as the years passed, Ben, in London, grew increasingly bitter toward the Crown, while William, in America, remained devoted to the King. By the time war came, their loyalties were divided, their relationship destroyed. Skemp traces William's career through the tumult of revolution and exile. Refusing to follow his fellow royal governors into asylum, he was arrested by the patriots and jailed; his wife soon died, and his property was confiscated. Upon release, William became president of the Board of Associated Loyalists in New York, where--neglected by the British and despised by the revolutionaries--he authorized one of the most notorious atrocities of the war, the hanging of Joshua Huddy. At war's end, Franklin fled into exile in England, hated by his countrymen, and disowned by the father he still venerated, and even loved. Sweeping and authoritative, William Franklin captures some of the great issues and personalities of the Revolutionary era, and the bitterness of a family split between father and son, patriot and loyalist.
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