How to start the semester? Use a textbook, Luke
Covid willing and the creek don’t rise we will start the semester in person four days from now. One problem I always have will upper-level Asian history c...
Category: Uncategorized
Ask Historians!
You would probably not think of Reddit as the best place to go for historical knowledge. For those of you who don’t know it, Reddit is the place where any...
Notes on Japanese Cuisine 1946
I picked up a cheap copy of an old 19461 tourist pamphlet Notes on Japanese Cuisine by Katsumata Senkichirō (勝俣銓吉郎). I’ve scanned my copy and uploaded it ...
Can a historian malign a ruling race?
A book I have been reading for fun this summer is Tim Harper Underground Asia: Global Revolutionaries and the Assault on Empire. It is a history of the various ...
Mass weddings in China-New Life Movement
This is a picture from a New Life Movement Mass Wedding in Nanjing. Couples could be married for a fee of only $20 after filling out a few forms and being check...
Syllabus blogging HIST 437 Modern Japan and the Taisho project
Update Here is the more or less final draft So, a bit late,but some syllabus blogging for Fall. At present this is supposed to be an in-person class. Thi...
The changing Chinese press
Cécile Armand has been posting on her work on the evolution of the Republican-era Chinese press, based on Carl Crow’s Newspaper Directory of China. Althou...
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...
Syllabus blogging Fall 2020 -HIST 433 China 1300-1800 The Late Imperial Age
There is a tradition here of blogging about our syllabi and asking for advice. This is my upper-division class for the semester, where I want to push students i...
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...
Can you speak Chinese?
Friend-of-the-blog Gina Tam1 has a new book out.Dialect and Nationalism in China, 1860-1960 Cambridge University Press, 2020 It is a really remarkable s...
Was Late Imperial China Early Modern?
Zou Jiajun posted on the Sinologists Facebook group asking how the term “Early Modern” got to be used in China studies. This is a an interesting question, since...
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...
Current Events/Current/Recent Events/Hong Kong/Politics/Popular Culture/Uncategorized/visual culture
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 ...
A Wuhan Timeline and Bibliography
The world’s attention has, for the most part, moved on from Wuhan, the city where the the Covid-19 virus outbreak began. Now the media both within and bey...