This paper examines the historical relationship between the Little Ice Age and the Anthropocene, which has not yet been studied. The Little Ice Age is the coldest multi-century period in the Holocene. The reforestation of huge farmlands, abandoned due to pandemics in the Americas, aggravated the cooling weather of the Little Ice Age. It was in the long and severe cold of the Little Ice Age that the transition from renewable energy to non-renewable energy was completed in Britain in the latter part of the eighteenth century, and when the pattern of linear growth in greenhouse gas concentrations was forged in the ecosystems of the Earth. The Little Ice Age forced humans to depend on fossil fuels while the advent of warmer and more stable climate in the Holocene enabled them to start agriculture in an energy revolution 11,000 years ago, thus making the coming of the Anthropocene possible.

Okakura Kakuz$\bar{o}$ (1863-1913), the founder of the Japan Art Institute, is best known for his proclamation, "Asia is One." This phrase in his book, The Ideals of the East, and his connections to Bengali revolutionaries resulted in Okakura being remembered as one of Japan's foremost Pan-Asianists. He did not, however, write The Ideals of the East as political propaganda to justify Japanese aggression; he wrote it for Westerners as an exposition of Japan's aesthetic heritage. In fact, he devoted much of his life to the preservation and promotion of Japan's artistic heritage, giving lectures to both Japanese and Western audiences. This did not necessarily mean that he rejected Western philosophy and theories. A close examination of his views of both Eastern and Western art and history reveals that he was greatly influenced by Hegel's notion of dialectics and the evolutionary theories proposed by Darwin and Spencer. Okakura viewed cross-cultural encounters to be a catalyst for change and saw his own time as a critical point where Eastern and Western history was colliding, causing the evolution of both artistic cultures.

After the outbreak of the Korean War on June 25, 1950, the US included the Republic of China on Taiwan (Taiwan hereafter) in its Asia-Pacific containment line, and restored the military and economic aid to Taiwan for the sake of regional security. The US aid to the countries along the Asia-Pacific defense line was not only in the form of supplying munitions, but also linked these countries together in an economic dimension. Taiwan is one of the 120 countries which had accepted US aid and also successfully moved from "dependence" to "independently sustained growth." This article will firstly review the historical background of US aid to Taiwan and related institutional development; secondly, this article will illustrate how Taiwan used US aid, and which economic sector the US aid affected; thirdly, it will trace the impact of US aid on Taiwan's foreign trade, and finally, to make a conclusion.

The popular uprisings that took place in the Arab world, and led to the overthrow of four heads of states, namely Zine El-Abidine Ben Ali (January 14, 2011) of Tunisia, Hosni Mubarak (February 11, 2011) of Egypt, Muammar al-Gaddafi (August 23, 2011) of Libya and Ali Abdullah Saleh (November 23, 2011) of Yemen, have attracted the attention of the world media and policy makers in the West and the Middle East, and triggered their concern for the political future of the region. This article does not offer a comprehensive assessment of these uprisings, but rather analyzes the coverage of Time and Newsweek of the underlying causes of the uprisings and their anticipated consequences. It also investigates how the two magazines have highlighted the scenarios that may pose a real challenge to Arab regimes supported by the American administration, and internationally reshape the priorities of American foreign policy in the region. These issues are examined from the two magazines' perspectives, which under line the features of U.S. foreign policy in the region, where the White House is more concerned about the security of the state of Israel, control of the Arab oil and suppression of "Muslim fundamentalism."

The Silk Road, a trans-Eurasian network of trade routes connecting East and Southeast Asia to Central Asia, India, Southwest Asia, the Mediterranean, and northern Europe, which flourished from roughly 100 BCE to around 1450, has enjoyed two modern eras of intense academic study. The first spanned a period of little more than five decades, from the late nineteenth century into the early1930s, when a succession of European, Japanese, and American scholar-adventurers, working primarily in Chinese Turkestan (present-day Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region, which comprises China's vast northwest) and China's Gansu Province (to the immediate east of Xinjiang) rediscovered and often looted many of the ancient sites and artifacts of the Silk Road. The second era began to pick up momentum in the 1980s due to a number of geopolitical, cultural, and technological realities as well as the emergence of the New World History as a historiographical field and area of teaching. This second period of fascination with the Silk Road has resulted in not only a substantial body of both learned and popular publications as well as productions in other media but also in an ever-expanding sense among historians of the scope, reach, and significance of the Silk Road.