I went to an interesting talk yesterday on “Denazification in Theory and Practice” given by Rebecca Boehling at the Center for European Studies. She opened with a discussion of how she got involved in doing more detailed research on the process of denazification in the early postwar occupation of Germany. She was apparently contacted before [...]
Well, sort of. Actually I have to share it with two other people. But this is not to be underestimated. I’m a real man now, or at least, a real graduate student. Even though I’m a lowly G1 (Gadfly Level 1) just starting out on my path to enlightenment in a history Phd, I have [...]
My little online database of quotes is growing. It has temporarily dissapeared from the top right of my blog due to a bug but will be back once I switch this blog to WordPress. You can see the quotes from the PHP script that I wrote: Fool’s Quotes script page. Just keep reloading for a [...]
I have seen a few of these in books discussing racist US propaganda, but there is a wonderful online Catalog of Political Cartoons by Dr. Seuss. See the images related to Japan.
Phil Gyford is blogging the Diary of Samuel Pepys. (Link thanks to Keywords). What a fantastic application of this medium. Imagine if there were some idle, but careful and dedicated hands that were willing to blog the diaries of other fascinating people of the past. I can think of dozens of figures in modern East [...]
In celebration of the month of the flying squirrel, a holiday spanning late September and most of October with a 3000 year long tradition in the land of Muninn, I have resolved that for about one month this blog’s name will change to the Chinese for Flying Squirrel (鼯鼠 or wushu in Chinese, musasabi in [...]
Many of us here on earth cultivate for ourselves an identity. After some reflection and a little imagination, we take extra pride in identifying with some particular configuration of abilities, characteristics, or even physical or ethnic features. I am one of these people, and I have long cultivated, and perhaps taken pride in, my “jack-of-all-trades” [...]
I’ve been doing my reading for a historiography class all students in the history department take. Some of my Marx reading for the class got me thinking. I turned my thinking into a babbling article over on the East Asia International Affairs blog called, Freedom of Expression in China, Marx and the Bourgeois Constitution.
I’m reading an interesting book focusing on the early postwar period in Western Europe called The Legacy of Nazi Occupation: Patriotic Memory and National Recovery in Western Europe, 1945-1965. It focuses on three groups: veterans, drafted wartime laborers, and victims of Nazi persecution. The section on veterans highlights some of the diverse and often bizarre [...]
I’m really excited about starting my history PhD. I’m sure the misery and loneliness of grad school will hit me eventually but not yet. One of the professors who I hope to learn a lot from is Charles S. Maier, a professor of modern European history. I knew him from the introduction to a book [...]