Category: Books
How much is that goose in the window?
Another book I got for the holidays is Tim Brook. The Price of Collapse: The Little Ice Age and the Fall of Ming China. Princeton, 2023. Oddly enough, I read t...
Can a historian malign a ruling race?
A book I have been reading for fun this summer is Tim Harper Underground Asia: Global Revolutionaries and the Assault on Empire. It is a history of the various ...
Can you speak Chinese?
Friend-of-the-blog Gina Tam1 has a new book out.Dialect and Nationalism in China, 1860-1960 Cambridge University Press, 2020 It is a really remarkable s...
Ichi-F -Japanese workingman’s blues
One of my Christmas gifts was Ichi-F: A Worker’s Graphic Memoir of the Fukushima Nuclear Power Plant As it says on the cover, it is a worker’s memoir. The...
Huainanzi and teaching Early China
I really liked using Huainanzi in my upper-division Early China class this semester. I have a habit of switching books a lot in all my classes, in part because...
Teaching with old photographs
One thing that I have started teaching with this semester is Ed Krebs and Hanchao Lu, eds., China in Family Photographs: A Peoples History of Revolution and Eve...
Women Warriors in Japanese History? Yes, but…
The subtitle to this article tells you most of what you need to know: Christobel Hasting, “How Onna-Bugeisha, Feudal Japan’s Women Samurai, Were Era...
Pan-Asian Hell
People like Hell. Most religions seem to have one, and depicting it is a classic way of instructing the masses about the wages of sin. Reproducing these images ...
Teaching Revolutionary China : China 1927: Memoir of a Debacle
A book that seems to have worked well for me in my teaching is Zhu Qihua China : China 1927: Memoir of a Debacle The class was History of Modern China,, syllabu...
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...
China from “Over There” to “Back Then”: A Second Helping on E.A. Ross
Alan Baumler’s juicy February 19 post “Edward Alsworth Ross and The Good Old Days of Scholarship,” inspired me to look back through my notes.1...
Books with “Laozi” on the cover
Konrad called my attention to Paul R. Goldin’s “Those Who Don’t Know Speak: Translations of the Daode Jing by People Who Do Not Know Chinese.”1 As you mig...