Sources in the digital age -馬馬虎虎
Particularly as I work on the visual culture of aviation (one of my current projects) I am getting both encouraged and discouraged about the state of sources in...
Category: visual culture
Art and status and women and mirrors and…
This is an image from the back of a Song dynasty mirror in the collection of Martin J. Powers. As he describes it One [woman], on the right, tends a child and s...
Dress and identity in the Qing
I have been reading Guojun Wang’s Staging Personhood: Costuming in Early Qing Drama. I am not particularly a student of drama, or of costume, but in the T...
Masks in recent Chinese History
So this is a post that already seems outdated, but I thought I would do it anyway. Masks now mean something quite different than they did before, and I am sure ...
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...
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...
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 ...
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 ...
Teaching images- Glimpses of Modern China
Do you follow Glimpses of Modern China ( 秋海棠民國史地 ) on Facebook? You should, since they post all sorts of interesting images and videos you can teach with. Or th...
Art and War in Modern Japan
If you teach Modern Japan you are probably used to having lots of cool pictures to show your students. You probably pinch a lot of them from the MIT Visualizing...
Chiang Kai-shek, Enemy of the People
I have found and interesting source. Dr Jeremy Taylor at the Department of History, University of Nottingham has a site entitled ‘Enemy of the People̵...
Chinese Manhua and social criticism
I have been preparing a paper for a conference here at IUP, but since the conference is postponed as we are on strike I thought I would share some of it with yo...
Where’s my Flying Imperialism?
While googling around looking for advertising posters for Asian airlines of the 20’s and 30’s I found this. It is from a series of prints showing the Japanese e...
Multi-cultural Chiang Kai-shek
Here is a nice picture of Chiang Kai-shek and his government’s outreach to minority nationalities. It comes from 蒙藏月報1935,3(6) (Mongolia and Tibet Monthly...
Chinese government graphics
One thing that you notice when you look at Chinese government reports and such from the 20’s 30’s and 40’s is how amazing the graphics are. I ...