Classics professor ROBERT A. KASTER takes readers along the ancient highway the Appian Way from the center of Rome to the heel of Italy. He tells the story of the road and the people who traveled it — from a footsore Roman soldier to craftsmen and pious pilgrims headed to Jerusalem — in The Appian Way: Ghost Road, Queen of Roads (University of Chicago Press). “No road in Europe has been so heavily traveled, by so many different people, with so many different aims, over so many generations,” he writes.
In Krupp: A History of the Legendary German Firm (Princeton University Press), HAROLD JAMES explores the Krupp family and its company, which made steel and played a central role in arming Nazi Germany. A professor of history, James analyzes the company’s transition from a family business to one owned by a nonprofit foundation.
JANET Y. CHEN examines the lives of the urban poor in China during the early 20th century, when poverty became part of the national conversation, in Guilty of Indigence: The Urban Poor in China, 1900–1953 (Princeton University Press). She also explores Chinese attitudes toward urban poverty and the development of policies intended to alleviate it. Chen is an assistant professor of history and East Asian studies.
In The Jewish Jesus: How Judaism and Christianity Shaped Each Other (Princeton University Press), PETER SCHÄFER looks at the ways Christianity and rabbinic Judaism influenced each other in Late Antiquity by examining the texts of those traditions. Schäfer is a professor of Jewish studies and religion and director of the Program in Judaic Studies.
Students and colleagues of WEN C. FONG ’51 *58, professor emeritus of art history and art and archaeology, contributed nearly 40 essays on Chinese, Japanese, and Korean art history to Bridges to Heaven: Essays on East Asian Art in Honor of Professor Wen C. Fong (Department of Art and Archaeology/Princeton University Press). The two volumes address topics ranging from early jades to photography, and modern museum practice. The editors are JEROME SILBERGELD *69, professor of Chinese art history at Princeton and director of Princeton’s Tang Center for East Asian Art; DORA C.Y. CHING *11, the Tang Center’s associate director; JUDITH G. SMITH, an administrator in the Asian art department at the Metropolitan Museum of Art; and ALFREDA MURCK *95, a guest research fellow at the Center for Research on Ancient Chinese Painting and Calligraphy at the Palace Museum in Beijing.