My left eyebrow has a scar. It is jagged, and usually the droop of the eyebrow hides it from view. I see it sometimes when I look in the mirror. When I see it, I am reminded instantly of my father. He was sitting, reading a newspaper, on the lawn of our Lahore house. It was near to 6:00 p.m.—late evening to dusk. I had recently conquered the art of biking and I was eager to show him how well I rode. I kept going past him on the bike, but he was engrossed in the paper. Finally I decided that to really get his attention, I would need to go really, really fast. I went a ways, and began to pedal furiously. Right as I gathered full speed and came up to him, I looked at him to see if he was watching me. He wasn't. That split second, however, was enough for me to lose control of the bike, which swerved radically to the left, and I went face-first into a column of bricks. He looked up as I stumbled up, my eye covered in blood. I have no memory of this, except for when I “see” my scar.

I first heard of “radioactive coal” in the summer of 2012, when I was living in the small village of Koyan, one of many settlements in Eastern Kazakhstan that hosted the Soviet-era Semipalatinsk Nuclear Test Site. A scandal over the sale of radioactive coal had erupted in the fall of 2011 when local media began reporting on a train from Kazakhstan carrying more than eight thousand tons of it (in 130 wagons) to a heating plant in Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan. Upon discovering that radioactivity in the shipment was eight times higher than normal, Kyrgyz authorities had it removed from the Bishkek's central heating plant. Rather than discarding it, they put it to use elsewhere, including in the heating stoves of more than one orphanage, a kindergarten, and several rural schools. When media covered this development, public outcry forced Kyrgyz politicians to demand that the coal be returned to Kazakhstan; allegations of corruption and arrests of Kyrgyz officials ensued. Political wrangling over responsibility and refunds meant that negotiations between Kazakh and Kyrgyz authorities took more than a year to complete. Finally, Kazakhstan allowed the coal to be returned.

A full decade has passed since Frederic Wakeman, Jr., published his influential “Rebellion and Revolution: The Study of Popular Movements in Chinese History” (1977). He opened his article with the observation, “During the past twenty-five years, hundreds of studies of Chinese peasant rebellions have appeared in print.” He added that most of these studies had been published in the People's Republic, but in his bibliography he listed dozens of entries by Western scholars on the topic. Significantly, while noting that Western studies of peasant resistance in China “drew upon Chinese scholarship to write histories of their own,” Wakeman emphasized that Western historians were divided on the issue of whether the “Maoist depiction of Chinese history as perennial class struggle” was accurate. He summed up the controversy in these words:

Was an immiserated peasantry ruthlessly exploited by a venal landlord class through the sweep of pre-modern Chinese history? Or would it be more accurate to say that, while the population suffered in times of epidemic or famine, there were long periods of plenty when relatively affluent farmers benefited from rising agricultural prices, and negotiated rental contracts to their own liking with accommodating landlords? (Wakeman 1977:202)

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Indian classical music was in transition. Most readings of the transition stress the choices of the professional musicians, as these musicians and the institutions in which they functioned were caught up in political and economic movements such as nationalism and commercialization. This article studies a different type of transition: when a small-town professional group with a strong associational culture became musicians. This second process, standing in contrast to the received narratives, suggests novel lessons in the history of urban cultures during a time of change.

The first volume of the Tsinghua University Warring States bamboo-strip manuscripts contains a text with passages that match medieval quotations of a text referred to as Cheng Wu 程寤 or Awakening at Cheng, which in turn is said to be a lost chapter of the Yi Zhou Shu 逸周書 or Leftover Zhou Documents. The passages concern one of Chinese literature's earliest interpretations of a dream, and were quoted in medieval encyclopedias in their sections on dreams. This article discusses the significance of this discovery both for Chinese textual history and for the interpretation of this particular dream. In particular, it shows that trees seen in the dream predict the Zhou conquest of Shang, and the subsequent Shang acquiescence to Zhou rule. It also notes that this discovery simultaneously confirms the antiquity of this text, but also calls into question the dominant traditional interpretation of the dream.

Representative Government was an institution dear to the hearts of nineteenth-century Englishmen. It was their pride and, they affirmed, the source of their national strength that they lived under this form of constitution. They were eager that others, especially their colonies, should enjoy its benefits. There were few obstacles in the way of the establishment of representative institutions in the white colonies: the land was different but the people were the same. But in India neither the land nor the people resembled those of England. Nonetheless, the British determined to train an educated, Westernized elite which would make possible the establishment of representative institutions there.

Turbulent years before and after the Meiji Restoration in 1868 have been one of the most extensively written pages of Japanese history. Much work has been carried out on the revolutionary samurai and the aspiring merchants who implemented the upheaval. Curiously, however, revolts and rebellions which erupted at more popular levels, such as peasant uprisings and urban mass disturbances during this period, have drawn little scholarly attention. According to the literature survey of Irwin Scheiner, no work on Japanese peasant uprisings has been published English since Hugh Borton's study in 1938.

By what standards should we judge works of art from another culture or era? We are generally used to the idea that understanding the meaning of an image requires consideration of its distinctive context—literary, religious, social, and so on. Evaluating the quality of a work of art is another specific case of this broad dilemma of understanding. Do we evaluate good and bad images by the “proper” criteria and in the way that is appropriate to them?