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 ...
Author: Alan Baumler
Who likes short shorts?
Columbia University Press sent me a copy of Mu Aili and Mike Smith’s Contemporary Chinese Short-Short Stories: A Parallel Text. The book is, as you might have g...
Teaching Tokugawa math
Do you teach Tokugawa Japan? If so you probably spend some time talking about the rise of popular education, the terakoya temple schools etc. I found a good boo...
Fame! and journalism
Don’t you hate it when a good bit of teaching material comes to your attention just a little too late? I hate it when that happens. In this case the probl...
Syllabus blogging for Spring 2018
This is way too early for me, but I thought I would procrastinate on grading a bit by thinking about what I will be doing in Spring and asking for some advice. ...
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...
Teaching Revolutionary China : China 1927: Memoir of a Debacle
A book that seems to have worked well for me in my teaching is Zhu Qihua China : China 1927: Memoir of a Debacle The class was History of Modern China,, syllabu...
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...
Internet Culture and Rough Music
Not really a post, but more of an idea. I ran across this, about victims of the alleged Las Vegas shooting who are being harassed on-line. I say alleged, becau...
North Korea in the News-Trump is a dotard
As some of you may know, Kim Jong-un has referred to Donald Trump as a “dotard“, and this has caused a good deal of comment. Does this mean that Kim...
China-Burma-India and popular history sources
Looking for information on the American involvement in China in World War Two? Not too long ago that would have been the last thing anyone who did serious China...
Syllabus blogging for Fall 2017
There is a tradition here of posting our syllabai and asking for advice on how to teach things. Ideally we would do this long enough before the semester starts ...
Would the Boxers vote for Trump?
Of course not. They were not registered, and in any case that would be foreign interference in an election that would Hurt The Feelings Of The American People. ...
Aviation and Asian Modernity 1900–1950
Hey look! Up in the sky! It’s …scholarship! Well, my bibliography on Asian aviation anyway. More importantly, it looks like the whole Oxford Bibliog...
End of an Era
On this date, April 25, in 1644 the Chongzhen Emperor, last ruler of the Ming Dynasty hung himself from a tree on Meishan in Beiijng, bringing an end to Ming (a...