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Piercing the bamboo curtain

Tentative bridge-building to China during the Johnson years

by Michael Lumbers

This new study is the first comprehensive account of U.S. Policy toward China during the presidency of Lyndon Johnson, a critical phase of the Cold War immediately preceding the dramatic Sino-American rapprochement of the early 1970s.

Based on a thorough review of a wide array of recently declassified government documents, this book offers a fresh perspective by challenging the popular view that Johnson’s approach to China was marked by stagnation and sterility.

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Victorians and the Virgin Mary

Religion and gender in England 1830 - 1885

by Carol Engelhardt Herringer

this book seeks to revise our understanding of the Victorian religious landscape by retrieving Catholics from the cultural margins to which they are usually relegated. By showing that the Roman Catholics and Anglo-Catholics constituted a significant proportion of Victorian society that was opposed to the Protestant majority, this analysis more accurately evaluates their contributions to Victorian culture.

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Eleventh-century Germany

The Swabian chronicles

Translated and selected by I. S. Robinson

In the abbey of Reichenau, in the south-western duchy of Swabia, the great polymath Herman 'the Lame' composed a chronicle that contains the most detailed account of the reign of Emperor Henry III (1039-56). His pupil and biographer, Berthold of Reichenau continued his master's work, composing a rigorous extant account of the years 1076-1079 in Germany.

The Swabian chronicles reveal how between 1049 and 1100 the centripetal attraction of the reform papacy became the dominant fact of intellectual life in German reformed monastic circles.

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