The Banality of a New Spirit Movement 새마음운동
While poking around for English language materials to offer students on post-1945 South Korea, I came across The New Spirit Movement, a 1979 collection of short...
Author: K. M. Lawson
Drawings in the North Korean Magazine Hwalsal/Hwasal
I’ve been watching Twitter not-so-slowly go into decline and it has made me reflect on how, increasingly over the last decade, I’ve been sharing fun sour...
Notes on Japanese Cuisine 1946
I picked up a cheap copy of an old 19461 tourist pamphlet Notes on Japanese Cuisine by Katsumata Senkichirō (勝俣銓吉郎). I’ve scanned my copy and uploaded it ...
The American Geographical Society’s China
In a recent posting, I took a look at the Taiwan volume in an old series of colorful books called the “Around the World Program” published by the Am...
The American Geographical Society’s Taiwan
For over a decade, beginning around 1955, and then again during a short 1990s revival, the American Geographical Society (AGS) published a large series of color...
Student Handbook for Fall 2020 – MO3055 The History of History in East Asia
Inspired by Alan’s syllabus blogging for his History of East Asia class, I thought I would contribute my own new fall offering. Teaching in Scotland at my...
A Child’s Guide to Japanese Empire
I recently had the pleasure of browsing the 1936 edition of a most interesting children’s almanac or encyclopedia called the Gakuyū Nenkan (学友年鑑 School fr...
Historical Maps of Wuhan
As may be clear from my recent postings on rumours in Wuhan, the language of Wuhan, a timeline and bibliography about Wuhan, and a post on Wuhan on the eve of r...
Rumours in Wuhan 1911
We live in a time of rumours. Often these rumors have little impact on our behavior, and at most can serve to relieve or exacerbate our indignation or dismissal...
The Language of Wuhan
The Wuhan dialect is often described as a “southwestern mandarin variety” of Chinese. For over a century foreigners, especially missionaries who liv...
A Wuhan Timeline and Bibliography
The world’s attention has, for the most part, moved on from Wuhan, the city where the the Covid-19 virus outbreak began. Now the media both within and bey...
Wuhan on the Eve of a Revolution
I stumbled across the American traveler William Edgar Geil’s Eighteen Capitals of China (1911). I wasn’t impressed. Even for its time, it is particu...
The Last Supper (2012): Xiang Yu Overthrows the Qin in order to…protect Diversity?
I’ve been listening to the lectures given by Prof. Ou Fan Leo Lee (李歐梵) for his Coursera course Classics of Chinese Humanities: Guided Readings from the C...
Encountering Classical Chinese Philosophy Through Translation and a Text Adventure Game
Over winter break I usually spend a good deal of time with my nephew, codename Loke, now 11 years-old. Over the past few years, I have hidden a bonus Christmas ...
Advice from Xu Gan in the Balanced Discourses
Over the holidays I had a chance to read John Makeham’s translation of Xu Gan’s (170-217 CE) late Han dynasty Balanced Discourses 中論 (Ctext).1 The w...