Living With Wikipedia (China Beat) and Social Bookmarking
China Beat asked me to pull together some thoughts on “WIKIPEDIA, the Free Encyclopedia.” With help from several friends, including Alan Baumler and Konrad Laws...
Category: Historiography
A disappointment
I’ve been enjoying the textbook I’m using for World History this fall: Felipe Fernandez-Armesto’s The World: A History. It covers the entire w...
Pirates!
September 19th is International Talk Like a Pirate Day. Again. I was going to do a short bit on the current state of Chinese pirate scholarship1 but Robert Ant...
Pearl Buck's Intriguing Staying Power: Imperial Woman
Parade Magazine (September 14, 2008) asked Laura Bush what she’s been reading: “The Imperial Woman, by Pearl S. Buck. I picked up this book after re...
"Never the Twain Shall (Track) Meet": Jeffrey Sonnenfeld and Olympic Lies
Jeffrey Sonnenfeld of the Yale School of Management has a well informed insider’s view of the Olympics, “Olympics Reveal East-West Divide.” (F...
Migration, Nationalism, Empire
Tessa Morris-Suzuki’s recent Japan Focus article, “Migrants, Subjects, Citizens: Comparative Perspectives on Nationality in the Prewar Japanese Empi...
What can China learn from the Jews
Via 鲍昆 an interview with Lydia Liu1 Liu’s work has to to with the difficulties of cultural contact and translation in the 19th century, so it is nice to s...
Lies, Damn Lies, and Chinese “Lies That Bind”
Do Chinese lie? The Western media have jumped on recent revelations about doctoring the Olympic opening ceremonies and allegations about false ages of their gym...
I hate this time of year
I still hate this time of year. Though the post and comments are of generally high quality, and the introduction of actual Japanese scholars and sources into th...
Modernization or Japanization? –The Movie “Homeless Angels” 1941
I had a chance to watch a Korean movie from the colonial period, called “Homeless Angels (집없는 천사, 家なき天使),” at the Korean Film Archive (KFA) in Susek...
Red Star Over Edgar Snow
Edgar Snow’s birthday is sometime this week but they can’t agree on which day it is. The 1972 obituary in the omniscient NY Times had it as July 19, 1905, as do...
Between the time when the oceans drank Atlantis*
How did the modern Chinese historians create a national history? One aspect of this is the creation of protohistory, explaining what was going on in a place bef...
Needling Needham
The Needham Question is hot, hot, hot! Thanks to Simon Winchester’s The Man Who Loved China: The Fantastic Story of the Eccentric Scientist Who Unlocked t...
Academia/Archives/China-Japan/Current/Recent Events/General/Historiography/Japan/Memory/photography/War
Archival Incidents, or What is it with Pictures?
Sean Malloy has withdrawn the pictures once touted as “newly discovered” photographs of Hiroshima in the immediate aftermath of the atomic bombing. ...
Different understandings of history
Charles links below to an interesting piece from China Digital Times (original from Sina.com ) It is a piece by Xiong Peiyun (熊培云) defending (sort of) Chinese n...