Teaching with Tools
One of the classes I will be doing next semester is History 200, Introduction to History, which is our methods course for majors, usually taken when they are so...
Author: Alan Baumler
Asian symbols
Useless Tree has a post up on the Chinese roots of the Korean flag. This post led me to look up an interesting, if rather old, article on the use of R...
Jackie Chan and Louis Cha
Everybody knows about ping pong diplomacy, but we seem to have just completed a period of Canto-pop diplomacy, as Jackie Chan has recorded an “official...
The crucibe of Revolution
One of the nice thing about studying modern Chinese history is that Chinese states have gone to gone to great lengths to collect oral histories and other accoun...
How many times can we lose China?
via James Fallows a link to James C. Thomson’s “How Could Vietnam Happen?” a 1968 piece that The Atlantic has lifted from their archive. Thoms...
Dragon mountain again
A few days ago Jonathan and I were discussing Steven Owen’s review of Jonathan Spence’s new book. Jonathan was not that impressed with the review, a...
It's a -very large- stuffed panda
As a visual aid for Charles’s post below I would like to add this.
The emperor did care about the well-being of the peasants
From Oddnumbers1 a post on historical income inequality, which is based on this paper One of the things that they conclude is that China in the 188o’s was...
Return to Dragon Mountain
There is a long review of Jonathan Spence’s new book Return to Dragon Mountain: Memories of a Late Ming Man in TNR. Just the fact that there is a long rev...
Some stuff
Just some random stuff that caught my eye. Have any of our readers spent time teaching English in Asia? You blew it. You thought you were doing well just by mak...
China on display
Historians have been very interested in World’s Fairs, international exhibitions and such for a while now. This is in part because of Gellner and Anderson...
Non-commercial emotion
James Fallows recommends the Shanghai Propaganda Poster Art Center. At least as a web museum it is not as good as Stefan Landsberger’s I did find the intr...
Book stuff
Once again it is time to ask questions about books. Order forms for the Spring are due, so I need to figure out what I want to order. Thus I am asking for sugge...
The good helmsman
With double ten around the corner it seems a good time to discuss the vexed question of who was China’s greatest leader.1 Via ESNW we learn that at least ...
More on public history
I posted a while back on how the Chinese are more aggressive in re-building historical sites than one would expect in the West. Angela Zito explains some possib...