Tokugawa Japan-What’s the question?
So, again this fall I will be having students in my upper-level class (in this case Early Modern Japan) do a group research project. The end of the project wil...
Category: Posts
Hong Kong Education in Chinese Schools 1929
Today I was browsing through US national archives microfilm reels containing state department records related to British Asia, 1910-29.1 There is always fun and...
Cleaning Up Tables from Primary Sources in ChatGPT
I’ve been following with interest the debates around the rapid emergence of powerful large language models such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT, its Bing siblin...
Confucius at Eighty: Sufficiently Decayed or Ready for a Great Xi Change?
Kong Qiu, Kongzi, or Master Kong, known in English as “Confucius,” marked the passing of the decades: At fifteen I set my heart upon learning.At thirty, I had p...
The Banality of a New Spirit Movement 새마음운동
While poking around for English language materials to offer students on post-1945 South Korea, I came across The New Spirit Movement, a 1979 collection of short...
Drawings in the North Korean Magazine Hwalsal/Hwasal
I’ve been watching Twitter not-so-slowly go into decline and it has made me reflect on how, increasingly over the last decade, I’ve been sharing fun sour...
Group research project -Abortive Revolution
Update Here is the semi-final list of topics for the group research project. So if you want a definitive list of all the things that were going on in Republican...
Failure to communicate -Huainanzi
So, the Huainanzi project in my early China class went ok, and would have worked better if I had been better at explaining what I wanted from the final paper. I...
Syllabus blogging Fall 2020 -HIST 433 China 1300-1800 The Late Imperial Age
There is a tradition here of blogging about our syllabi and asking for advice. This is my upper-division class for the semester, where I want to push students i...
A Wuhan Timeline and Bibliography
The world’s attention has, for the most part, moved on from Wuhan, the city where the the Covid-19 virus outbreak began. Now the media both within and bey...
Mapping China from the air
Since I have been posting maps, I thought I would put this up. This is from Shigeru Kobayashi 小林茂, Gaihōzu : Teikoku Nihon no Ajia chizu 外邦図 : 帝国日本のアジア地図 (Tōk...
Confucius hates Japan
Once upon a time I was big into Chinese currency. Not so much as a speculator, but as one of the people who bought old banknotes from people who were selling th...
Revolutionary China
Looking to spend some money? There are a lot of good essays in the Routledge Handbook of Revolutionary China. The editing is not that good, but there are some r...
Bullets and Opium-Tiananmen thirty years later
Part of my summer reading has been Liao Yiwu‘s Bullets and Opium: Real-Life Stories of China after the Tiananmen Square Massacre. Liao got in trouble afte...
“What I Read Over Summer Vacation” (part one?)
I’ve been on something of a tear through my to-read pile in search of… well, I’m not entirely sure some days. A lot of what’s in that st...