Author: Jonathan Dresner
Diaspora experience as a function of modernity, imperialism, and nationalism.
From my online course on Asia-US migration, an upcoming discussion: The second half of [Vinay] Lal’s book [The Other Indians: A Political And Cultural His...
Oh, internment again.
This is something I wrote for my Asia-US migration class this week. We’re reading Erika Lee’s The Making of Asian America. You can figure out which ...
A thought on military and transnational history in lieu of a review
In that odd lull between end-of-semester grading and final exam grading, I finally got around to reading that interlibrary loan book that was due last Friday, K...
An update on the Marco Polo problem
I said when I introduced the History Carnival that I’d been doing a lot of private blogging in the form of online course materials, and I really should sh...
History Carnival #160
Welcome to the November 2016 History Carnival! It’s been a while since I hosted a carnival, and a while since I was blogging regularly, as well. Unless yo...
Memory Politics and Memory Drama
Jordan Sand’s A Year of Memory Politics in East Asia: Looking Back on the “Open Letter in Support of Historians in Japan” is immensely timely: I spent a f...
Immigrant Panics, then and now.
There’s not all that much to add to George Takei’s devastating response to Roanoke Mayor David Bowen’s attempt to rationalize refusing Syrian ...
Reading Note: Oleg Benesch, “Inventing the way of the Samurai: Nationalism, Internationalism, and Bushido in Modern Japan”
Before I praise Benesch’s book, a complaint: Oxford UP pricing is absurd. Now that’s not unusual for academic hardbacks, monographs that go to libra...
Doing Ironic Irony Ironically: Play-Acting Satires of Orientalist Japonisme?
Update at end Evan Smith of “Big, Red, and Shiny” reports: The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston has found itself mired in controversy over an in-gallery ...
The Right Turn
Basharat Peer interview with Pankaj Mishra on China and India is worth reading, and not that long, but I was particularly struck by this bit towards the end: &#...
Food History Themes and Exceptions
Once is a fluke. Twice is coincidence. Three times is a conspiracy. There’s a theme that runs through a great deal of food history writing, nearly all of ...
Dastardly, Diabolic, Secret, Silent and Deadly Saboteurs
It’s almost like he’s kidding, but surely a professional writer would know that sarcasm doesn’t translate to the page, right? NPR’s Lint...
Science, Social Science, and Pseudoscience of Diet/Culture Thesis
Eminent food historian Rachel Laudan alerted me recently to the existence of new scholarship, cultural psychology, giving support to the idea that different bas...