Drawing on stele inscriptions in a Yuan-period ancestral graveyard, this article aims to shed light on the emergence and evolution of a Chinese office-holding family in North China under Mongol rule (thirteenth- to fourteenth century). Tracing the family's connections with Mongols, it argues that adaptation to the Mongolian patronage system was essential to obtaining and maintaining political status during the Yuan, and that the kin group was stratified with the patronized descent line monopolizing political privilege. In doing so, the article highlights the value of stone inscriptions in clarifying official status, patronage, and inheritance rights in North China during the Yuan period.

I have written this essay to address what I regard as a pressing need among China historians for a stronger model of climate change and its impact on state and society during the imperial period. We have all become acutely conscious of climate change as an element of our own world, yet few of us have considered the impact of climate, particularly climate change, on our subjects of study. China is not without its climate historians, and yet the collective research is still in an early phase. Aware of this problem for some time, I published preliminary findings in the form of a chronological profile of climate anomalies through the Yuan and Ming dynasties in 2010. Burying my findings in a textbook has meant that the periodization offered there has captured the interest of some students but gone largely ignored by scholars in the field. Since then I have done further research and have revised some of those findings, and would now like to offer a fuller presentation of methods and findings.

After being recalled to Beijing in 1510 for evaluation and reassignment in the wake of his two-year exile to Guizhou and his period of service as a magistrate, Wang Yangming was assigned to a succession of posts at the capital that kept him there through 1512. During that short time, he remained disillusioned with the Ming court and high politics and chose to put his energies into fostering a philosophical movement. He believed that by restoring the “way of master-disciple relations and friendship,” he could help propagate the learning of the sages. To that end, he held jiangxue gatherings with colleagues and friends and carried on an active correspondence. In those venues, Wang Yangming engaged others with his ideas about the goal of sagehood, the obstacles to attaining it, and the methods for overcoming those obstacles. The following article reconstructs this critical period in Wang Yangming's philosophical development and the intellectual movement he sought to foster, as well as the status of his philosophy as of this point in time.

The first known record of the Manchu origin myth is found in Qing documents dating from 1636. These documents provide an official account of the origin of the Aisin Gioro lineage, including the story of the ancestor Bukūri Yongšon, who is depicted as the Manchu primogenitor, from his birth to his ascension to the throne. This article argues that the Manchu origin myth reflected the dynamics of Manchu identity, which shifted from constructing a Manchu group to securing Manchu rule during the period from the seventeenth to the eighteenth centuries. By tracing the development of this myth from its earliest version in the seventeenth century to four different versions that appeared by the mid-eighteenth century, written in both Manchu and Chinese, this article endeavors to shed new light on how the Manchus saw themselves, their ancestor, and their empire.

The burial of war dead was a key element of displacement and community formation during wartime and postwar China and Taiwan, 1937–1955. Reckoning with the physical burial and spiritual pacification of civilian as well as military dead posed practical and epistemological problems for the tens of millions forced to migrate amid shifting political and military boundaries. Various populations of living and dead refugees became increasingly politicized on the national and international levels, affecting local rituals and family burials. The accumulation of unidentified or lost bodies raised the stakes for the incorporation of the known dead into local, translocal, or national communities. The moral imperative of families and lineages to reconstitute themselves in the aftermath of war was made concrete via the extensive networks of locally-identified charitable organizations who worked to transport coffins back “home” from China's interior. The Nationalist government, meanwhile, prioritized symbolic control over military heroes in ways that ignored or eschewed burial and family ritual. The KMT and those who fled with them to Taiwan in 1949 were then cut off from their national as well as family graves, and struggled to find ritual and practical methods of overcoming or temporarily ameliorating political boundaries, geographic distance, and the passage of time.

Historians have long aspired to see beyond the rise and fall of dynasties to the longue durée and the major changes over time in Chinese society. The five empirically rich and theoretically sophisticated books discussed in this essay all share this goal. While they make distinct contributions, they have in common close attention to the relationships between the state, the elite, and local institutions between the late Tang and Qing periods. Reading them together encourages rethinking the state-and-society issues that historians have been debating for a generation. In this essay, after a brief summary of each book's major contributions, I suggest ways they help us conceptualize the long-term processes of continuity and change from the late Tang to the Qing.

The history of World War II has long been a favorite topic of military, diplomatic, and social historians (even more so for viewers of the History Channel), but the focus has typically been on the European theater. With a more limited archival record, the conflict in Asia has received less attention. This is certainly not because Asia was less important. The war undermined the legitimacy of colonial regimes throughout Southeast Asia, led to the division of Korea into two hostile states, and contributed in fundamental ways to the collapse of the Nationalist regime in China and the triumph of the Communist revolution. The last few years have seen substantial new scholarship on the 1937–45 War of Resistance in China and what Japanese historians often call the Fifteen-Year War, starting with the occupation of Manchuria in 1931. The number of titles falls far short of what has been written on Europe, but the war in China is now being approached in new and interesting ways.