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“A standout . . . a balanced, informative, and highly intelligent guide to dealing with China.”—Fareed Zakaria Many see China as a rival superpower to the United States and imagine the country’s rise to be a threat to U.S. leadership in Asia and beyond. Thomas J. Christensen argues against this zero-sum vision. Instead, he describes a new paradigm in which the real challenge lies in dissuading China from regional aggression while encouraging the country to contribute to the global order. Drawing on decades of scholarship and experience as a senior diplomat, Christensen offers a compelling new assessment of U.S.-China relations that is essential reading for anyone interested in the fu...
The world of 1616 was a world of motion. Enormous galleons carrying silk and silver across the Pacific created the first true global economy, and the first international megacorporations were emerging as economic powers. In Europe, the deaths of Shakespeare and Cervantes marked the end of an era in literature, as the spirit of the Renaissance was giving way to new attitudes that would lead to the age of revolutions. Great changes were also taking place in East Asia, where the last native Chinese dynasty was entering its final years and Japan was beginning its long period of warrior rule. Artists there, as in many parts of the world, were rethinking their connections to ancient traditions and...
This book provides a new analysis of why relations between the United States and the Chinese Communists were so hostile in the first decade of the Cold War. Employing extensive documentation, it offers a fresh approach to long-debated questions such as why Truman refused to recognize the Chinese Communists, why the United States aided Chiang Kai-shek's KMT on Taiwan, why the Korean War escalated into a Sino-American conflict, and why Mao shelled islands in the Taiwan Straits in 1958, thus sparking a major crisis with the United States. Christensen first develops a novel two-level approach that explains why leaders manipulate low-level conflicts to mobilize popular support for expensive, long...
This collection brings together an anthology of articles by Thomas Christensen, one of the leading historians of music theory active today. Published over the span of the past 25 years, the selected articles provide a historical conspectus about a range of vital topics in the history of music theory, focusing in particular upon writings from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Christensen examines a variety of theorists and their arguments within the intellectual and musical contexts of their time, in the process highlighting the diverse and idiosyncratic nature of the discipline of music theory itself. In the first section of the book Christensen offers general reflections on the mean...
Stories of Tonality in the Age of François-Joseph Fétis explores the concept of musical tonality through the writings of the Belgian musicologist François-Joseph Fétis (1784–1867), who was singularly responsible for theorizing and popularizing the term in the nineteenth century. Thomas Christensen weaves a rich story in which tonality emerges as a theoretical construct born of anxiety and alterity for Europeans during this time as they learned more about “other” musics and alternative tonal systems. Tonality became a central vortex in which French musicians thought—and argued—about a variety of musical repertoires, be they contemporary European musics of the stage, concert hall, or church, folk songs from the provinces, microtonal scale systems of Arabic and Indian music, or the medieval and Renaissance music whose notational traces were just beginning to be deciphered by scholars. Fétis’s influential writings offer insight into how tonality ingrained itself within nineteenth-century music discourse, and why it has continued to resonate with uncanny prescience throughout the musical upheavals of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.
In brute-force struggles for survival, such as the two World Wars, disorganization and divisions within an enemy alliance are to one's own advantage. However, most international security politics involve coercive diplomacy and negotiations short of all-out war. Worse Than a Monolith demonstrates that when states are engaged in coercive diplomacy--combining threats and assurances to influence the behavior of real or potential adversaries--divisions, rivalries, and lack of coordination within the opposing camp often make it more difficult to prevent the onset of conflict, to prevent existing conflicts from escalating, and to negotiate the end to those conflicts promptly. Focusing on relations ...
The collection, transportation and subsequent processing of waste materials is a vast field of study which incorporates technical, social, legal, economic, environmental and regulatory issues. Common waste management practices include landfilling, biological treatment, incineration, and recycling – all boasting advantages and disadvantages. Waste management has changed significantly over the past ten years, with an increased focus on integrated waste management and life-cycle assessment (LCA), with the aim of reducing the reliance on landfill with its obvious environmental concerns in favour of greener solutions. With contributions from more than seventy internationally known experts prese...
"Ranging widely over the musical and intellectual thought of the eighteenth century, Thomas Christensen orients Rameau's accomplishments in the light of contemporaneous traditions of music theory as well as many of the scientific ideas current in the French Enlightenment. Rameau is revealed to be an unsuspectedly syncretic and sophisticated thinker, betraying influences ranging from neoplatonic thought and Cartesian mechanistic metaphysics to Locke's empirical psychology and Newtonian experimental science. Additional primary documents and manuscripts (many revealed here for the first time) help clarify Rameau's fascinating and stormy relationship with the Encyclopedists: Diderot, Rousseau, and d'Alembert." "This book will be of value to all music theorists concerned with the foundations of harmonic tonality and it should also be of interest to scholars of eighteenth-century science, the Enlightenment, and the general history of ideas."--BOOK JACKET.
Sanitary Landfilling: Process, Technology, and Environmental Impact is a collection of essays that discusses the role of landfilling in solid waste management. The book presents the approach in the principles of landfilling and the basic biochemical processes in landfills. The text describes the landfill hydrology and leachate production. It discusses the design and construction of liner systems and the surface capping with natural liner materials. The section that follows describes the soil and refuse stability in sanitary landfills. The book will provide valuable insights for engineers, environmentalists, students, and researchers in the field of solid waste management.
With its title harkening back to the sack of Baghdad in 1258—when the Tigris ran black with the ink of books flung into the water by Mongol invaders—River of Ink is a collection of essays that range widely across time and cultures to illuminate the role of literature and art throughout history. Christensen draws from a panoply of subjects, from the writings of prehistoric Chinese cultures known only through archaeology to the heroic efforts of contemporary Afghanis to keep the legacy of their ancient culture alive under the barrage of endless war. Christensen's encyclopedic knowledge of world art and vast understanding of literature allows him to move easily from a discussion of the inve...