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: Historiography
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 ...
Was Late Imperial China Early Modern?
Zou Jiajun posted on the Sinologists Facebook group asking how the term “Early Modern” got to be used in China studies. This is a an interesting question, since...
Grand Centennial Best Opening Vignette Contest!
Jonathan’s “On the Opening Vignette” is so fresh and smart that the only response is to turn it into a contest: who can write the best opening...
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...
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...
Yi Soon Shin: Warrior and Defender and Yi Soon Shin: Fallen Avenger: Bad
At Planet Comicon in Kansas City last month, I came across a gentleman selling a comic book series based on the Hideyoshi invasions of Korea, known in Korea as ...
Asian American/Diaspora/Ethnic Minorities/globalization/Historiography/Imperialism/India/Nationalism
Diaspora experience as a function of modernity, imperialism, and nationalism.
From my online course on Asia-US migration, an upcoming discussion: The second half of [Vinay] Lal’s book [The Other Indians: A Political And Cultural His...
Oh, internment again.
This is something I wrote for my Asia-US migration class this week. We’re reading Erika Lee’s The Making of Asian America. You can figure out which ...
Books/Books and Articles/China-Japan/China-Korea/Choson/Historiography/Korea-Japan/Military/Ming/War/安土桃山
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...
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...
Visual Digital History
Laura Putnam has an article out in the new issue of AHR “The Transnational and the Text-Searchable: Digitized Sources and the Shadows They Cast“ One...
Atrocities/China-Japan/Current/Recent Events/Film/Historiography/Korea-Japan/Memory/Nationalism/Pedagogy/War/昭和
Memory Politics and Memory Drama
Jordan Sand’s A Year of Memory Politics in East Asia: Looking Back on the “Open Letter in Support of Historians in Japan” is immensely timely: I spent a f...
Understanding China-The interview
Stone Bridge Press is bringing out a deluxe edition of Jing Liu’s Understanding China Through Comics, which I have been reviewing here and enjoying very m...