The Great Hall of the People in Beijing, China’s capital city, was the setting of the National Congress of the Communist Party of China. These large events takes place every five years. Why are they so important? In this issue, we provide a brief history of China, what happens at a National Congress and why, this year’s did not follow recent tradition.
Selected contributions to the Ninth World Shakespeare Congress, which took place in July 2011 in Prague, represent the contemporary state of Shakespeare studies in thirty-eight countries worldwide. Apart from readings of Shakespeare’s plays and poems, more than forty chapters map Renaissance contexts of his art in politics, theater, law, and material culture and discuss numerous cases of the impact of his works in global culture from the Americas to the Far East, including stage productions, book culture, translations, film and television adaptations, festivals, and national heritage.
The little known story of perhaps the most productive Congress in US history, the First Federal Congress of 1789–1791. The First Congress was the most important in US history, says prizewinning author and historian Fergus Bordewich, because it established how our government would actually function. Had it failed—as many at the time feared it would—it's possible that the United States as we know it would not exist today.
This book is a collection of papers from the 9th International ISAAC Congress held in 2013 in Kraków, Poland. The papers are devoted to recent results in mathematics, focused on analysis and a wide range of its applications.
Convened following Napoleon’s defeat in 1814, the Congress of Vienna is remembered as much for the pageantry of the royals and elites who gathered there as for the landmark diplomatic agreements they brokered. Historians have nevertheless generally dismissed these spectacular festivities as window dressing when compared with the serious, behind-the-scenes maneuverings of sovereigns and statesmen. Brian Vick finds this conventional view shortsighted, seeing these instead as two interconnected dimensions of politics.