Textbooks and teaching. A new dawn?
Major and Cook’s Ancient China: A history is now available as open access via Routledge. This is good news, and got me to thinking about teaching and textbooks...
Author: Alan Baumler
Who were the people in wartime China?
Just for fun, here is a table I found of those who jumped from the parachute tower in Chongqing between April of 1942 and April 1943. I suppose I should open wi...
Tokugawa Japan-What’s the question?
So, again this fall I will be having students in my upper-level class (in this case Early Modern Japan) do a group research project. The end of the project wil...
Group research assignments
Final report on group research assignment. It seems to have gone pretty well. Of the 22 students who finished the class 14 did the survey about it (anonymous, ...
Group research project -Abortive Revolution
Update Here is the semi-final list of topics for the group research project. So if you want a definitive list of all the things that were going on in Republican...
Teaching the death of Mao Zedong
If you ever have to teach about the end of Maoism, Ai Qing‘s poem “On the Crest of a Wave” is a good thing to use. Ai was one of China’s...
Failure to communicate -Huainanzi
So, the Huainanzi project in my early China class went ok, and would have worked better if I had been better at explaining what I wanted from the final paper. I...
The Jiankang Empire
I don’t usually post book reviews here, and this is not really a book review, but I got a lot out of Andrew Chittick’s new book The Jiankang Empire in Chinese a...
How to start the semester? Use a textbook, Luke
Covid willing and the creek don’t rise we will start the semester in person four days from now. One problem I always have will upper-level Asian history c...
Jonathan Spence has ascended to heaven on a dragon
Well, actually, that is how the death of the emperor was announced in the 1987 Bernardo Bertolucci film The Last Emperor, which came out just as I was starting ...
Taisho Project assessment
The project is here I thought it went pretty well, although there are some things I need to work on. I had the students do a survey about it, and most of them f...
Ask Historians!
You would probably not think of Reddit as the best place to go for historical knowledge. For those of you who don’t know it, Reddit is the place where any...
Syllabus Blogging for Spring 2022
As in the past, I need to order books for classes, and more generally think about what I will be doing next semester, so as always I am posting here. Posting t...
Sources in the digital age -馬馬虎虎
Particularly as I work on the visual culture of aviation (one of my current projects) I am getting both encouraged and discouraged about the state of sources in...
Can a historian malign a ruling race?
A book I have been reading for fun this summer is Tim Harper Underground Asia: Global Revolutionaries and the Assault on Empire. It is a history of the various ...