The Songs of Chu
Columbia University Press sent me a copy of Gopal Suku’s new translation of Qu Yuan’s The Songs of Chu. I am not qualified to speak about it as a scholarly tran...
Category: Teaching
Student Handbook for Fall 2020 – MO3055 The History of History in East Asia
Inspired by Alan’s syllabus blogging for his History of East Asia class, I thought I would contribute my own new fall offering. Teaching in Scotland at my...
Syllabus blogging for Fall 2020 HIST 206 History of East Asia
There is a tradition here of blogging about our syllabi and asking for advice. Fall semester will be a bit different. We will be doing hybrid (well, actually Ha...
Spreading Revolution from Wuhan, 1911
This is an image I use in class, from Caroline Blunden and Mark Elvin. Cultural Atlas of China New York: Facts on File, 1983. p.158. This has some good images i...
Iron Man Wang
For your teaching pleasure, here is the story of Iron Man Wang, from China Reconstructs, Sept, 1977. I have a pile of old 70’s Chinese propaganda magazine...
Opening vignettes on Tokugawa prostitutes
I never really responded to Jonathan’s post on opening vignettes as pedagogy, but I do like using them. In fact, I will be using a couple Monday. Sometime...
Classical Chinese for Everyone
Looking for a fun book? Look no further! Bryan Van Norden’s Classical Chinese for Everyone: A Guide for Absolute Beginners is it. This is a book for anyon...
Ichi-F -Japanese workingman’s blues
One of my Christmas gifts was Ichi-F: A Worker’s Graphic Memoir of the Fukushima Nuclear Power Plant As it says on the cover, it is a worker’s memoir. The...
Huainanzi and teaching Early China
I really liked using Huainanzi in my upper-division Early China class this semester. I have a habit of switching books a lot in all my classes, in part because...
Teaching with old photographs
One thing that I have started teaching with this semester is Ed Krebs and Hanchao Lu, eds., China in Family Photographs: A Peoples History of Revolution and Eve...
Who are the shi?
Since I am teaching Early China this semester, I am drawing from Yuri Pines, Envisioning Eternal Empire: Chinese Political Thought of the Warring States Period ...
Did Chinese women go to opium dens?
Since someone asked me if Qing women went to opium dens, I thought I would answer and put up some of my evidence. Short answer – I don’t think so, a...
Visual Shanghai
I went to the Shanghai History Museum today and got some nice teaching-related images. Some of them are useful, but not that exciting, like a nice rickshaw and ...
Was Hirata Atsutane Japan’s first Science Fiction writer?
Maybe. Well, sort of. It kind of depends on how you define things. Hirata Atsutane (1776-1843) was one of the key thinkers and popularizers of Japanese Nativism...
Pan-Asian Hell
People like Hell. Most religions seem to have one, and depicting it is a classic way of instructing the masses about the wages of sin. Reproducing these images ...