Touching, humorous, and illuminating, this travelogue takes readers back in time to a remarkable, world-shaping moment. With rich language and the help of a remarkable journal, author Kate Teltscher traces two extraordinary journeys across some of the harshest and highest terrain in the world: the first British expedition to Tibet and the Panchen Lama’s state visit to mark the Emperor’s seventieth birthday. In the late eighteenth century, with their empire expanding, the British sought a commercial opening to China. European traders were banned from China, but the cunning British East India Company saw a possible advocate in the Panchen Lama, the spiritual leader of the Buddhist people of Tibet. In the hopes of gaining access to Peking, they sent a young Scot named George Bogle as their envoy.

Bogle was able to gain an audience with the Panchen Lama, and in him he found much more than a business partner; the Incarnate Lama was a friendly man who loved to discuss politics, science, art, and culture. Bogle gradually became less of a tourist and less of a colonist, growing comfortable and happy the longer he spent in Tibet even as his mission to open China failed. All the while, he kept a detailed journal—his prose by turn playful, self-deprecating, grandiose, and shrewd—and this revelatory document gives readers an exhilarating front seat to the beginnings of international relationships that exert their effects even now.

Teltscher’s portrayal of Bogle’s unique diplomatic relationship with the holy man is an admission that history is made by people—and people have emotions, flaws, and feelings that enrich and affect history.

Bounded by Sudan to the west and north, Kenya to the south, Somalia to the southeast, and Eritrea and Djibouti to the northeast, Ethiopia is a pivotal country in the geopolitics of the region. Yet it is important to understand this ancient and often splintered country in its own right.

In A History of Modern Ethiopia, Bahru Zewde, one of Ethiopia’s leading historians, provides a compact and comprehensive history of his country, particularly the last two centuries. Of importance to historians, political scientists, journalists, and Africanists alike, Bahru’s A History of Modern Ethiopia, now with additional material taking it up to the last decade, will be the preeminent overview of present-day Ethiopia.

Silence has many causes: shame, embarrassment, ignorance, a desire to protect. The silence that has surrounded the atrocities committed against the Jewish population of Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union during World War II is particularly remarkable given the scholarly and popular interest in the war. It, too, has many causes—of which antisemitism, the most striking, is only one. When, on July 10, 1941, in the wake of the German invasion of the Soviet Union, local residents enflamed by Nazi propaganda murdered the entire Jewish population of Jedwabne, Poland, the ferocity of the attack horrified their fellow Poles. The denial of Polish involvement in the massacre lasted for decades.

Since its founding, the journal Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History has led the way in exploring the East European and Soviet experience of the Holocaust. This volume combines revised articles from the journal and previously unpublished pieces to highlight the complex interactions of prejudice, power, and publicity. It offers a probing examination of the complicity of local populations in the mass murder of Jews perpetrated in areas such as Poland, Ukraine, Bessarabia, and northern Bukovina and analyzes Soviet responses to the Holocaust.

Based on Soviet commission reports, news media, and other archives, the contributors examine the factors that led certain local residents to participate in the extermination of their Jewish neighbors; the interaction of Nazi occupation regimes with various sectors of the local population; the ambiguities of Soviet press coverage, which at times reported and at times suppressed information about persecution specifically directed at the Jews; the extraordinary Soviet efforts to document and prosecute Nazi crimes and the way in which the Soviet state’s agenda informed that effort; and the lingering effects of silence about the true impact of the Holocaust on public memory and state responses.

In 1997 the United Kingdom returned control of Hong Kong to China, ending the city’s status as one of the last remnants of the British Empire and initiating a new phase for it as both a modern city and a hub for global migrations. Hong Kong is a tour of the city’s postcolonial urban landscape, innovatively told through fieldwork and photography.

Caroline Knowles and Douglas Harper’s point of entry into Hong Kong is the unusual position of the British expatriates who chose to remain in the city after the transition. Now a relatively insignificant presence, British migrants in Hong Kong have become intimately connected with another small minority group there: immigrants from Southeast Asia. The lives, journeys, and stories of these two groups bring to life a place where the past continues to resonate for all its residents, even as the city hurtles forward into a future marked by transience and transition. By skillfully blending ethnographic and visual approaches, Hong Kong offers a fascinating guide to a city that is at once unique in its recent history and exemplary of our globalized present.