This special issue of Journal of Chinese History makes the case that military institutions are essential for understanding Chinese history. Our goal is to engage a broad audience instead of talking exclusively to specialists in military history. Thus, rather than an institutional account of, say, the imperial guard, or detailed campaign narratives, readers will find here exploration of the dynamic interplay between military institutions and political control, socioeconomic change, dynastic finances, and cultural values.

“Japan has everything except hope.” This is a phrase that has become current to explain the social climate of contemporary Japan, such as the problems of bullying in schools and workplaces, the high suicide rate, people who have withdrawn from society, ethnic discrimination, and so on. These are not accidental problems, but historically and socially structured ones that have surfaced as expressions of the modern forms of individualism. They are not isolated phenomena found only in Japan, but may be seen as aspects of a broader crisis of global modernity. How can we transform this desperate, self-destructing social situation and find a sustainable future? This line of questioning is one of the crucial problems in this critically important book by Prasenjit Duara.

This article traces the process through which Alisher Navoi, a fifteenth-century Chagatai-Turkic poet from Herat, Afghanistan, became uzbekified and sovietized by Uzbek writers and scholars from the 1920s to the 1940s. It focuses on how shifting visions of nation-building affected Navoi's representation in Uzbek national historiography during the early Soviet period. The 1948 Soviet celebration of the 500th anniversary of Alisher Navoi's birth established the poet as a symbol of Uzbek “national-exceptionalism” that distinguished the Uzbek nation from other Central Asian nations. As a consequence Alisher Navoi's legacies that had regional significance were reduced to national heritage and the region's history was revised accordingly. The article, however, argues that the Soviet canonization of Alisher Navoi was not a rootless imposition of cultural history unfamiliar to the Uzbek people. Rather it was a realization of a nation-building project initiated by native Central Asian intellectuals called Jadids before the very creation of the Uzbek nation-state. Even though these intellectuals were persecuted during the 1930s Stalinist Terror, their ideas survived and were picked up by a new generation of Uzbek writers. This article also discusses how World War II provided an opportunity and justification for the Uzbek writers to rediscover their nation's pre-Revolutionary history and strengthened the Uzbek national ownership of Navoi legacies.

Half a century on from Ivor Noel Hume's reference to archaeology as the ‘handmaiden to history’, historical-period archaeology has come quite a way. From disparate origins, in anthropological approaches to material and rescue archaeology in North America, and industrial and buildings archaeology in Britain and Europe, the sub-discipline has coalesced into a structured approach to the recent past. Hume's comment is often misinterpreted as a critique of archaeology's supposed inferiority to history, yet his comment actually refers to the potential for archaeological material to inform historical narratives, fill in gaps and populate the histories of non-literate peoples with a material culture. Unfortunately, overlap between the two disciplines is still in relatively short supply. In light of the recent material turn in the humanities, however, as well as an increased interest amongst historians and geographers in engaging with material culture, archaeological approaches to artifacts, sites and built heritage are in a strong position to inform methods for examining the historical material environment. Collaboration is now not only necessary, but timely, and this review of theses is an attempt to further that potential for co-operation amongst those who study the past. The doctoral theses reviewed here explore changes and developments in the modern city from a material perspective, evidencing both the breadth of approaches and the potential for research in the arts and archaeological sciences to stimulate new studies across different disciplines.

Current knowledge of the beginnings of crop cultivation in Lithuania is based mainly on Cerealia-type pollen data supplemented by other indirect evidence such as agricultural tools. We argue that these records, predating carbonized remains of cultivated plants, are not substantial enough indicators of the early stages of agriculture in Lithuania. Here, we demonstrate that the macroremains of cultural plants that were previously reported from two Neolithic settlements in Lithuania were either mistakenly identified as domestic crops or incorrectly ascribed to the Neolithic period due to movement through the stratigraphic sequence and the absence of direct dating of cereal grains. Furthermore, we present a charred Hordeum vulgare grain from the Bronze Age settlement of Kvietiniai in western Lithuania. It was AMS-dated to 1392–1123 cal bc, and at present represents the earliest definite evidence for a crop in the eastern Baltic region. We conclude that, presently, there are no grounds to suggest that crop cultivation took place in Lithuania during the Neolithic.

This article investigates a particular phenomenon of coordination that delivers important clues about the nature of syntactic structures. We call this phenomenon left node blocking – the designation is a play on the related concept of right node raising. Left node blocking provides insight into how syntactic structures are produced and processed. The dependency grammar analysis of the left node blocking phenomenon put forth here focuses on roots in coordinated strings. By acknowledging roots, it is possible to discern what coordination is revealing about syntactic structures. In particular, coordination delivers evidence for relatively flat structures.