A Child’s Guide to Japanese Empire
I recently had the pleasure of browsing the 1936 edition of a most interesting children’s almanac or encyclopedia called the Gakuyū Nenkan (学友年鑑 School fr...
Category: Textbooks
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...
Shen Fu vs. Zhang Daye
One thing I always have to do as a teacher is figure out what books to assign. Since I always find this hard to do, I thought I would think it out in terms of M...
Tonghak and Taiping
I was struck, preparing for class yesterday, that the Tonghak and Taiping faiths were surprisingly similar and arose nearly simultaneously: Syncretic monotheist...
Once more, dear friends, into the breach….
In my first post here I said that I was going to be teaching a Korean history course for the first time: I lied. Or rather, I was scheduled to teach it, but the...
Remixing Tagore
This story in the Korea Times about Rabrindranath Tagore’s poem ‘The Lamp of the East’ caught my eye. In the South Korean nationalist imaginat...
Orthodoxy, or more revisionism? (History news round up II)
Time for part two of my history news round up. Another big history-related story toward the end of last year concerned a proposed new rightwing history textbook...
History, or politics by other means
I would like to share my musings and solicit opinions on one issue I always was interested in – namely, to what degree the ways in which states attempt to...
‘An Elementary Reader for Citizens’ (國民小學讀本)
At my own blog I’ve been writing a series of posts about some interesting old Korean books I’ve come across in the library of the School of Oriental and African...
Japanese teacher disciplined for opposing nationalist textbooks
I wonder whether anyone else has seen this article from the Christian Science Monitor, which I picked up via the Marmot’s Hole and Far Outliers. It concer...