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...
Category: Pedagogy
Discussion about teach history in the classroom and beyond.
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...
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...
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...
Reading Note: Oleg Benesch, “Inventing the way of the Samurai: Nationalism, Internationalism, and Bushido in Modern Japan”
Before I praise Benesch’s book, a complaint: Oxford UP pricing is absurd. Now that’s not unusual for academic hardbacks, monographs that go to libra...
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...
Turnbull Book on Ako
Stephen Turnbull, one of the most prolific and controversial writers on Japanese military history, has written a book on the 47 Samurai incident. The Samurai Ar...
Books and Articles/Cultural/English/Foreign Views/Historiography/Japan/martial arts/Pedagogy/Popular Culture/US-Japan/江戸
Ninjas at Night, Dragons at Dawn: Magic Tree House does Japanese History
Mary Pope Osborne’s Magic Tree House series is intended to educate and entertain by taking its protagonists to different times and places, real and mythic...
Syllabus Blogging: Modern Japan and World History
It’s been a while since I did some syllabus blogging, but the most interesting course I was going to teach last semester didn’t come through,1 so it...
Data Visualization and Data Quality
The inestimable Rob MacDougall is running a course on Digital History, and even better, he’s running it more or less publicly! I’m getting all kinds...
Dinner first, then dessert
I was going to post about it here, but Another Damned Medievalist raised the question of how to deal with primary sources in a class where students lack importa...
Lines which make me less likely to adopt a world history textbook
So, I got a new one in the mail, and I start scanning through, with the usual particular attention to the Japan material, and right there in the “Cultural...
Mystery Circles on Early Armor
What is that circular disk which early medieval samurai wear over their swords? Is it a weight, to keep it from flopping around while horseriding? That’s ...
Academia/bibliography/Current/Recent Events/Economic/General/globalization/Historiography/Japan/Nationalism/Pedagogy/Teaching
Adjusting to the new narrative
My China-side colleague, Alan Baumler, noted that China seems to have supplanted Japan as the go-to model for economic development. This has, he says, required ...
Fields and Periodization (yes, again)
Jeff Vanke, now blogging at The Historical Society’s THS Blog, was looking for some guidance on how to properly divide up the history of the world into fi...