If, like me you have always wanted some good stats and a picture to explain land reform in Taiwan, here you go. This is from this article, which does a good job of describing the process. The poster is nice since it shows the rent reduction, the tiller getting the land, and then the ex-landlord...
Can AI do history? Someone sent me a link to this paper Can LLMs Act as Historians? Evaluating Historical Research Capabilities of LLMs via the Chinese Imperial Examination Gao et. al. are trying to get LLM s to demonstrate high order skills in historical reasoning, using a new benchmark ProHist-Bench. They determine, that no, they can t....
So, if like me you are teaching some version of World History 2-Modern Boogalloo, you will probably want to talk about the early modern rise of the public sphere and talk about how it creates a space (physical, like a coffee or teahouse or more abstractly like cheap prints in the vernacular) where a new...
If you are looking for a good new book to help you teach pre-Onin War Japan may I recommend Thomas Conlan’s Kings in All but Name: The Lost History of Ouchi Rule in Japan, 1350-1569?1 I should perhaps mention that I don’t really teach this. The closest I come (now that we no longer have...
If you do Republican period Chinese history you know that the various versions of the Chinese state loved graphical representations of data. (This may be something they picked up from the Japanese, who seem to have done a lot of this as well.) These are often, to my mind, weirdly hybrid things, since I am...
At some point in the future, you may find yourself having to explain a lot of Japanese history n a big hurry in order to get to the class you are actually teaching.1 This is a really good book, and also really good if you want to do a lot of visual stuff. Heian was...
There is a long history of talking about the Ladder of Success in Imperial China, and if the Chinese bureaucracy really was a Career Open to Talent. This was also one of the few topics where you had enough data to actually do some vaguely social science type stuff, which made it a very popular...
For those of you who are interested in such things, our M eudail Leader, Konrad has added more stuff (links to open access copies of volumes with Japanese statistics from colonial Korea) to our (well, his) page of primary sources on Korean history. Primary Sources: Modern Korean History
If you want to teach about the rapid spread of modern ideas in China after the Sino-Japanese war, the 1895 Taiwan Republic is good to talk about. Basically, when Taiwan was supposed to be handed over to the Japanese under the terms of the Treaty of Shimonoseki, there were attempts to create a Republic on...
The Qing was quite the Early Modern state, with considerable ability to do things and collect information about how well it was doing. The disastrously expensive campaigns to put down the White Lotus Rebellions 1794-1804 are usually cited as the turning point where the Qing s ability to both make China legible and control what was...