Immigrant Panics, then and now.
There’s not all that much to add to George Takei’s devastating response to Roanoke Mayor David Bowen’s attempt to rationalize refusing Syrian ...
Category: Historiography
Food History Themes and Exceptions
Once is a fluke. Twice is coincidence. Three times is a conspiracy. There’s a theme that runs through a great deal of food history writing, nearly all of ...
Wang Wei and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat
I have been reading Sarah M. Allen’s Shifting Stories: History, Gossip, and Lore in Narratives from Tang Dynasty China. One of the main texts she is look...
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...
Chinese Canon wars
From Xiaoqun Xu1 we get a wonderful description of a battle over the Chinese canon between Liang Qichao and Hu Shi. This took place in the pages of page...
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...
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...
When China was a Great Power
Recently I was Google-ing to find a picture of the statue of Liang Qichao that is, I think, in his hometown. No better way to show that someone made it big than...
American contempt for China
As it is the beginning of the semester, I went to dig up the famous quotes from Emerson and Adams on what is wrong with China. If you find yourself needing thes...
Teaching Asian Civilizations
As I was cleaning out my office I found a copy of Approaches to Asian Civilizations by Wm. Theodore de Bary and Anslie T. Embree.1 First published in 1964, the ...
Kids nowadays…
Need to read more Marx. Well, maybe they don’t, but it would make my job easier. I did a lot of Marx in my undergraduate days at Northern Illinois Univers...
History and hats
One book that I use in my classes is Bickers’ Empire Made Me: An Englishman Adrift in Shanghai. The book is the story of William Tinkler, an Englishman wh...
What Do Lin Yutang and Lin Biao Have in Common? They Were Both Memory Holed
Global Voices, a quite useful and smart blog, on January 30 posted Two Versions of Mao’s China: History Retouched as Propaganda, which has an set of uncanny ...
Reconsidering Marco Polo
“Marco Polo’s reports of China, now judged mostly hearsay….” Perry Anderson, LRB I got an email from a student who found my blog post in which...
Daiyou Islands: New Sources, New Clarity?
NYT reporter Nick Kristof brought in a guest blogger, Han-Yi Shaw of Taiwan, to examine some new mid-Meiji documentation about Japan’s relationship with t...