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 ...
Category: Academia
Academic Life
Why Read Wineburg?
Like a lot of people, I got my copy of Sam Wineburg’s new book Why Study History (When It’s Already on Your Phone) [University of Chicago Press, 201...
April History Carnival! #164!
Happy April! Most April Fools Jokes will fall into the May carnival, of course, but I can’t help noting two: American Historical Association, which really...
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...
To love the nation, you must buy a poster
A while back I posted about a poster from the Chinese Posters site, lamenting that they did not seem to have a copy of “To Love the Country You Must First...
David Todd Roy has died
This saddens me a great deal. I saw him speak years ago when only one volume of his Jin Ping Mei translation was out, and I wondered if he would finish. He did ...
Edward Alsworth Ross and the good old days of scholarship
Edward Alsworth Ross was the father of modern Sociology, or maybe Criminology or Anthropology (disciplines were harder to distinguish back then) and also a maj...
Its hard out there for a party historian
Xie Chuntao, the chief historian at the Central Party School has recently expressed an opinion that some parts of China’s history are closed, and likely t...
ASPAC 2014 Abstract: Japanese Historical Process in Anglophone Cinema
It’s that time of year again, when procrastinators do their taxes, spring cleaning, and summer abstract writing in one weekend! My proposed paper for ASPA...
A memory stirs…
Reading Emily Whewell’s review of this new book on the Chinese and Japanese treaty port systems and extraterritoriality brought back a long-ago scholarly ...
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 ...
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...
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...
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...