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...
Category: China
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...
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...
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...
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...
Too Many Men Again
There’s an article about China making the rounds: “Too Many Men” ; “In China and India, men outnumber women by 70 million. Both nations ...
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...
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...
Articles/Authors/Books/China/China-U.S./Christianity/East vs West/Foreign Views/Frog in A Well/Historiography
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...
Salt, China, and Wikipedia
Slate has a post up on the abolition of the Chinese salt monopoly, and they are amazed that something that has existed for 2,600 years is now being abolished. ...
Early Medieval China
Just for fun I have been reading Early Medieval China: A Sourcebook.1 It is a very good book, written by a collection of the superheros of the field. The advert...
Understanding China Through Comics
The third volume of Understanding China Through Comics is out, and it is good. In my previous reviews I talked about how well the books explained Chinese histor...