Explore the events happening in Japan throughout the 19th century that protected the country against western supremacy as Politics and Society in Japan's Meiji Restoration shares how Japanese people in during this time thought and acted in dealing with foreign pressure and domestic discord.

Anne Walthall (Ph.D., University of Chicago) is a professor emerita of history at University of California, Irvine, where she taught courses on Early Modern and Modern Japanese History. Her publications include Japan: A Cultural, Social, and Political History; East Asia: A Cultural, Social, and Political History, with Patricia Ebrey and James Palais; Recreating Japanese Men, edited with Sabine Fruhstuck; and The Weak Body of a Useless Woman: Matsuo Taseko and the Meiji Restoration.

M. William Steele (Ph.D., Harvard University) teaches history at the International Christian University College of Liberal Arts, where he has served as the Director of the Institute of Asian Cultural Studies. He has also taught as lecturer in Japanese history at Harvard University. He has served as editor for Tokushu: Kindai to Nosutarujia (Modernity and Nostalgia) and Kikan Nihon shisoshi, No. 77. His other publications include Alternative Narratives in Modern Japanese History and Japan and Russia: Three Centuries of Mutual Images."