Diaspora And Diplomatic Communities Memorialize Conflict
A memorial plaque was dedicated in a park in Palisades Park, New Jersey in 2010 which reads In Memory of the more than 200,000 women and girls who were abducted...
Author: Jonathan Dresner
What if it's a fake? What if it isn't?
Jeremiah Jenne pointed me to this most wonderful bit of French nonsense: Jean Levi’s claim that the terracotta army is a modern forgery. These famous clay...
Moving Migration Into History
Via Aaron Bady, I saw a wonderful article by Imke Sturm-Martin about the challenges of integrating migration history into the mainstream of European historical ...
Real History, alternate possibilities: Nuclear Weapons Edition
Not much of a post, given the nature of my frenetic academic life these days, but Alex Wellerstein’s post at Nuclear Secrecy raises fascinating question a...
Credentialism and Other Modern Traditions
The Japan Times article on Japan’s application to UNESCO to have 和食 [washoku, Japanese cuisine] declared an internationally recognized “intangible c...
History Carnival CVI (December 2011-January 2012)
Welcome to the 106th Roundup of History Blogging, a double-sized edition. Fortunately, being a blog, we never really run out of space. First, the two biggest ev...
SHAFR Roundtable on Pearl Harbor (Plus HNN Bonus Article)
In honor of the 70th anniversary of the Japanese attack on the US at Pearl Harbor, the Society for the History of American Foreign Relations has published a ser...
Seppuku: A Samurai Suicide Miscellany
For a little entertainment this Thanksgiving, I read Andrew Rankin’s Seppuku: A History of Samurai Suicide (Kodansha, 2011).1 Since I’m teaching bot...
The Three Stages of Ninja
The ninja question came up last week in my Samurai class — we were talking about possible writing projects — so I had to do my ninja spiel, which ha...
Twitterstorian Anniversary
As an historian, I consider anniversaries irrelevant. However, as a social function, naturally, they matter a great deal, and the internet itself moves so quick...
Turnbull Book on Ako
Stephen Turnbull, one of the most prolific and controversial writers on Japanese military history, has written a book on the 47 Samurai incident. The Samurai Ar...
Academia/Cultural/Current/Recent Events/English/Foreign Views/Historiography/Japan/Memory/Nationalism/US-Japan/平成
Old Myths, New Myths: Problems of Informed Punditry
The Asia/Pacific Journal, aka Japan Focus, has a fascinating interview with Heinrich Reinfried, Senior Lecturer in East Asian Studies at the University St. Gall...
Academia/Books and Articles/Current/Recent Events/General/globalization/Historiography/Japan/Nationalism/昭和
Feeling Like an Empire: Colonial Radicalization
What makes Louise Young’s Japan’s Total Empire: Manchuria and the Culture of Wartime Imperialism such a fascinating, troubling work is that she deta...
Books and Articles/Cultural/English/Foreign Views/Historiography/Japan/martial arts/Pedagogy/Popular Culture/US-Japan/江戸
Ninjas at Night, Dragons at Dawn: Magic Tree House does Japanese History
Mary Pope Osborne’s Magic Tree House series is intended to educate and entertain by taking its protagonists to different times and places, real and mythic...
Books and Articles/English/Foreign Views/globalization/Historiography/Japan/martial arts/US-Japan/安土桃山/江戸
Young Samurai: Way of the Dragon and the Battle of Osaka
The third installment of Chris Bradford’s Young Samurai series shifts modes mid-book, when the action moves from the original Harry Potter-esque bildungsr...