Category: Teaching
Acting quickly, he formed a committee to study the issue
Via Crooked Timber, an adaptation of Little Sisters of the Grasslands that will appeal to anyone who likes Maoist kitsh, or who works in an American university,...
Escaping the Binaries of Meiji Modernity
I gave a talk at the “Promoting and Resisting Westernization in Meiji Japan” symposium this past weekend at Scripps College in Claremont, CA. The sy...
History Carnival #38
“For both nations and inviduals have sometimes made a virtue of neglecting history; and history has taken its revenge on them.” — H. R. Trevor...
Creating East Asia
东亚三国的近现代史 A History of Modern and Contemporary East Asia is a book that got a lot of press when it first came out, since it was written by a team of scholars fr...
How much do your students remember?
I’m looking over the Condensed History of China (Thanks, Simon) and thinking to myself “yeah, it’s brutally short, but if my students remember...
Bashing Mao Bashing
My one regret, really, of not going to the AAS this year, was that I could not go to the 20th Century China Forum round table on Chang and Halliday’s Mao:...
Denis Twitchett and the Cambridge Histories
Denis Twitchett, author of the groundbreaking Financial Administration Under the T’ang Dynasty and a strong guiding force behind the Cambridge History ser...
Nomads and China
As the final installment in our exciting series of syllabus posts I present my last class for the semester, Nomadic Empires and China It is a topics class, so i...
Rice Paddies
Following Jonathan’s lead, here is my syllabus for History of East Asia, more commonly known as Rice Paddies. I suppose the first question to answer is wh...
Menzies and the problem of the "Smoking Gun" document
Menzies’ thesis won’t die. Just when it seemed to be fading out (unless Menzies’ argument about Mongol exploration is really his next focus), ...
Lumpy Chinese History
There are a few places to go for archived syllabi — H-Net, ExEAS, I had a printed collection at one point, as well, then there’s the GMU Syllabus Fi...