Category: History

[caption id="attachment_890" align="aligncenter" width="564"] Widow's Memorial Arch in Sichuan, China. Photo by Wilson Edward Manly courtesy USC. [/caption] Reading Gail Hershatter's The Gender of Memory: Rural Women and China's Collective Past for a class this week and I was piqued by the mentions of the memorial arches (牌坊) that were…

We recently read Foucault in our Historical Methods class; specifically, his chapter on Discipline. At the end of the chapter, Foucault raises the specter of the Panopticon and a society so throughly infused with self-regulated discipline. What makes discipline insidious is not that it can be seen, but rather, it…

Working on a paper on Malacca - fascinating to read about something that I grew up so close to, and yet is so remote to me both in spatial and temporal terms now.

"[Chinese] places could and should be filled with worthier immigrants — Europeans, who would take the oath of allegiance to the country, work both for themselves and for the commonwealth, fraternize with us, and, finally, become a part of us. All things considered, I cannot perceive what more right or…

Professor Zheng showed this picture as an example of the anti-Christian (especially anti-missionary) sentiment sweeping through China in the last decade of the 19th century. I was intrigued - why had the artist chosen a pig to represent Jesus? I began searching, and found that this was part of a…