front cover of Europe and the End of Medieval Japan
Europe and the End of Medieval Japan
Mark Hudson
Arc Humanities Press, 2024
Japan’s transition from medieval to early modern occurred at the time of an emerging global Europe. In the 1540s European traders and missionaries began a century of dynamic cultural and economic interaction with the Japanese Islands. In the midst of civil war, over 300,000 Japanese converted to Christianity and Japan became an influential location in the Counter-Reformation’s reinvention of Christianity as the first global religion. At the beginning of the seventeenth century, however, unification of Japan by the Tokugawa shoguns led to persecutions and strict limits on European presence in the country. Examining a range of topics, including the relationship between Christianity and folk religion, the introduction of firearms, new crops and cuisines, and treponemal disease, this book re-evaluates Japan’s transformation from medieval to early modern in a global context.
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front cover of Fire Management in the American West
Fire Management in the American West
Forest Politics and the Rise of Megafires
Mark Hudson
University Press of Colorado, 2011
Most journalists and academics attribute the rise of wildfires in the western United States to the USDA Forest Service's successful fire-elimination policies of the twentieth century. However, in Fire Management in the American West, Mark Hudson argues that although a century of suppression did indeed increase the hazard of wildfire, the responsibility does not lie with the USFS alone. The roots are found in the Forest Service's relationships with other, more powerful elements of society--the timber industry in particular.

Drawing on correspondence both between and within the Forest Service and the major timber industry associations, newspaper articles, articles from industry outlets, and policy documents from the late 1800s through the present, Hudson shows how the US forest industry, under the constraint of profitability, pushed the USFS away from private industry regulation and toward fire exclusion, eventually changing national forest policy into little more than fire policy.

More recently, the USFS has attempted to move beyond the policy of complete fire suppression. Interviews with public land managers in the Pacific Northwest shed light on the sources of the agency's struggles as it attempts to change the way we understand and relate to fire in the West.

Fire Management in the American West will be of great interest to environmentalists, sociologists, fire managers, scientists, and academics and students in environmental history and forestry.

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