FACT: “On the night of July 7, 1937, skirmishes between Chinese and Japanese troops near Beijing’s Marco Polo Bridge broke out, marking the beginning of World War II in China. The fighting quickly spread, and by month end Japanese forces had consolidated control over the region. An all-out assault on Shanghai in August, followed by the December slaughter of civilians and soldiers in Nanjing, forced the Nationalist government to flee. Chiang Kai-shek led his troops and supporters first to Wuhan, then to Sichuan, where he set up a temporary capital in Chongqing in October 1938.”

Guilty of Indigence: The Urban Poor in China, 1900-1953
by Janet Y. Chen

In the early twentieth century, a time of political fragmentation and social upheaval in China, poverty became the focus of an anguished national conversation about the future of the country. Investigating the lives of the urban poor in China during this critical era, Guilty of Indigence examines the solutions implemented by a nation attempting to deal with “society’s most fundamental problem.” Interweaving analysis of shifting social viewpoints, the evolution of poor relief institutions, and the lived experiences of the urban poor, Janet Chen explores the development of Chinese attitudes toward urban poverty and of policies intended for its alleviation.

  We are delighted to announce that Professor Paul Seabright will deliver the second annual Princeton University Press in Europe lecture during the London Book Fair. This year’s lecture, which marks our annual celebration of the Princeton University Press European Advisory Board, will take place on Wednesday 18th April at Goodenough College in London, under the [...]

David Scheffer, the first US ambassador for war crimes, has recently published All the Missing Souls: A Personal History of the War Crimes Tribunals with Princeton University Press. In the book, he discusses bringing some of the most notorious war criminals to justice. David was interviewed on BBC Radio 3 NightWaves on 25th January and the interview is now available to listen again here.

“Are the champions of the capitalist system now turning against the super-rich? And if they are, what will they now do about it? How can change be achieved without undermining the logic of capitalism?” Raghuram Rajan, author of Fault Lines: How Hidden Fractures Still Threaten the World Economy joins a panel to discuss these questions on Analysis on BBC Radio 4. The interview is now available to listen to online on the Analysis website.

Think solar flares are going to wreak havoc now? Wait till you read what happened in the 19th century:

“In September of 1859, the entire Earth was engulfed in a gigantic cloud of seething gas, and a blood-red aurora erupted across the planet from the poles to the tropics. Around the world, telegraph systems crashed, machines burst into flames, and electric shocks rendered operators unconscious. Compasses and other sensitive instruments reeled as if struck by a massive magnetic fist….Nobody knew what could have released such strange forces upon the Earth–nobody, that is, except the amateur English astronomer Richard Carrington who had observed a mysterious explosion on the surface of the Sun…”

Read The Sun Kings to learn more about Carrington and the solar flares of 1859..

Are you following PUP on Google+ yet? If not, today’s the day to add us to your circle—we’re giving away a copy of Magical Mathematics by Persi Diaconis & Ron Graham, along with a Magical Mathematics deck of cards to practice your magic tricks! Follow us by Friday to win!

Magical Mathematics: The Mathematical Ideas that Animate Great Magic Tricks
by Persi Diaconis & Ron Graham, with a foreword by Martin Gardner

Magical Mathematics reveals the secrets of amazing, fun-to-perform card tricks—and the profound mathematical ideas behind them—that will astound even the most accomplished magician. Persi Diaconis and Ron Graham provide easy, step-by-step instructions for each trick, explaining how to set up the effect and offering tips on what to say and do while performing it. Each card trick introduces a new mathematical idea, and varying the tricks in turn takes readers to the very threshold of today’s mathematical knowledge. For example, the Gilbreath Principle—a fantastic effect where the cards remain in control despite being shuffled—is found to share an intimate connection with the Mandelbrot set. Other card tricks link to the mathematical secrets of combinatorics, graph theory, number theory, topology, the Riemann hypothesis, and even Fermat’s last theorem.

It’s the question teenagers have been asking each other for decades to size up each others’ style, philosophy, and possibly even politics. There’s no doubt about it, music communities matter. But how much credit should we give to musical geniuses like George Clinton, or James Brown? Which musical failures should we blame on greedy record labels, or jealous spouses? And how much did spectacular events change musical history? What about Dylan going electric in Newport, or Hendrix playing Woodstock? In Banding Together, Jennifer Lena argues no genius, no accident, and no event matters as much to American popular musics as the everyday activities of the communities that support them. But Jenn not only offers a sociological explanation for the growth of 20th century American popular music, she also made us a mix tape! She was kind enough to share with me a “Spotify playlist for Banding Together”, along with some thoughts on her choices, which range from “Take My Hand, Precious Lord,” to “Me so Horny.” You can check out her playlist here:

The Banding Together Spotify playlist

Anyone that wants to hear the playlist needs to join Spotify (by creating a login ID and password), and downloading the free software. Then you can find the playlist for “Banding Together” by typing “spotify:user:lenajc” into the search box, or clicking on the link, above. Read on for some great music trivia after the jump:

“Kathleen Graber, assistant professor of English in the creative writing department at Virginia Commonwealth University, won the 2011 Literary Award for Poetry for The Eternal City. Graber’s book suggests the miraculous in ordinary human experience, exploring the interplay among the personal, historical, and philosophical.”

With an epigraph from Freud comparing the mind to a landscape in which all that ever was still persists, The Eternal City offers eloquent testimony to the struggle to make sense of the present through conversation with the past. Questioning what it means to possess and to be possessed by objects and technologies, Kathleen Graber’s collection brings together the elevated and the quotidian to make neighbors of Marcus Aurelius, Klaus Kinski, Walter Benjamin, and Johnny Depp. Like Aeneas, who escapes Troy carrying his father on his back, the speaker of these intellectually and emotionally ambitious poems juggles the weight of private and public history as she is transformed from settled resident to pilgrim.

Some of Graber’s wonderful poems can be found online. The New Yorker published The Magic Kingdom in 2008 and The Drunkenness of Noah in 2010.

FACT: “As part of his strenuous life, Theodore Roosevelt wrote a four-volume history of the American West, three biographies, and twenty-nine other volumes, plus some 150,000 letters. Winston Churchill would author forty books. A biographer calculated that in the early twenty-first century Churchill’s words still in print numbered over eight million.”

Roosevelt’s Lost Alliances: How Personal Politics Helped Start the Cold War
Frank Costigliola

In the spring of 1945, as the Allied victory in Europe was approaching, the shape of the postwar world hinged on the personal politics and flawed personalities of Roosevelt, Churchill, and Stalin. Roosevelt’s Lost Alliances captures this moment and shows how FDR crafted a winning coalition by overcoming the different habits, upbringings, sympathies, and past experiences of the three leaders. In particular, Roosevelt trained his famous charm on Stalin, lavishing respect on him, salving his insecurities, and rendering him more amenable to compromise on some matters.

Yet, even as he pursued a lasting peace, FDR was alienating his own intimate circle of advisers and becoming dangerously isolated. After his death, postwar cooperation depended on Harry Truman, who, with very different sensibilities, heeded the embittered “Soviet experts” his predecessor had kept distant. A Grand Alliance was painstakingly built and carelessly lost. The Cold War was by no means inevitable.

Congratulations to Margaret Cohen, whose book The Novel and the Sea has won the 2012 Barbara and George Perkins Prize from The International Society for the Study of Narrative. The prize is awarded to the book making the most significant contribution to the study of narrative in a given year.

“This book is bracing and exciting, an adventure in its own right. It skillfully makes its compelling case about the role played by maritime craft in the history of the adventure novel, and about the role played by adventure in the literary realm more generally. It will provoke thought, argument, and revision of some long-held truisms, especially about the importance of the novel of manners, and of psychological realism in prose forms of the modern West.”–John Plotz, Brandeis University

Margot Canaday’s brilliant book The Straight State: Sexuality and Citizenship in Twentieth-Century America has won the 2012 Order of the Coif Biennial Book Award.

“The Order of the Coif is an honorary scholastic society the purpose of which is to encourage excellence in legal education by fostering a spirit of careful study, recognizing those who as law students attained a high grade of scholarship, and honoring those who as lawyers, judges and teachers attained high distinction for their scholarly or professional accomplishments.”

This is Margot Canaday’s SEVENTH award for The Straight State. Some of the other accolades include the 2011 John Boswell Prize, the 2010 Cromwell Book Prize, the Lora Romero First Book Publication Prize, the Gladys M. Kammerer Award, and the Lambda Literary Award for LGBT Studies.