"Ancestral Leaves" follows one family through six hundred years of Chinese history and brings to life the epic narrative of the nation, from the fourteenth century through the Cultural Revolution. The lives of the Ye family- 'Ye' means 'leaf' in Chinese - reveal the human side of the large-scale eve[...]

The fall of empires and the rise of nation-states was a defining political transition in the making of the modern world. Here, ten prominent specialists discuss the empire-to-nation transition in comparative perspective. Chapters on Latin America, the Middle East, Eastern Europe, Russia, and China i[...]