I have blogged once before about a fantastic book by Pieter Lagrou called “The Legacy of Nazi Occupation: Patriotic Memory and National Recovery in Western Europe, 1945-1965 . The more I look at it, the more I think of it as a potential model for the kind of study I would like to do for [...]
Continuing my study of pre-modern Korean history for class, today I read through the English translation of a classic work on Korean geography and geomancy called 擇里誌 (택리지), written by Yi Chung-Hwan 이중환(李重煥) in the mid-18th century. A partial English translation is available as Yi Chung-Hwan, Inshil Choe Yoon trans. T’aengniji: The Korean Classic for [...]
I usually use the digital Wenlin dictionary because of its convenient look up features, speed, and high quality. Today an assignment I’m working on consists of reading reading a 1936 essay about Shanxi 山西 village life. (I often have to look up older terms in an 1930′s dictionary known as the “Mathews” dictionary. Wenlin is [...]
One of the interesting aspects of pre-modern Korean history is the existence of a huge number of slaves, perhaps averaging 30% or perhaps 40% of the population for the Chosŏn dynasty. As I read about this for my class and we had our discussion of it today, I found that there seems to be considerable [...]
When I arrived at Harvard this fall, there was one PhD student in particular that I very much looked forward to meeting. I had found mention in various places of a student at Harvard who was studying Sino-Japanese wartime relations named Qian Jinbao who had previously worked at the Nanjing historical archives that many a [...]
I think I snapped up one of the last in-stock Amazon copies of the wonderful Chinese Cursive Script: An Introduction to Handwriting in Chinese by Fang-yü Wang. We are using it in my class on 20th Century Chinese History Research Methods. It is essentially a class to help history students deal with Chinese documents and [...]
Speaking of Umberto Eco, he has a new book out! I wish I read Italian but I will have to wait until June of this year when the English version of his new La Misteriosa fiamma della regina Loana is due out.
How is that I have lived just over 29 years without ever having discovered Jorge Luis Borges? How did I manage not to hear about him or read his work? I have just been reading some of his essays/stories. He absolutely blows my mind. He is like some perfect combination of Edgar Allen Poe and [...]
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” [...]
Over on the EAIA blog I mentioned and summarized an article in International Security on the US-Japan alliance. I brought it up as a kind of controversial Realist article. Sayaka took the bait and bit a chunk out of the essay in a response she wrote in the next posting. She makes several excellent points [...]