Frog in a Well

Like me, you may have to teach about the economy and ecology of Late Imperial China.

In preparation for teaching my Japanese Empire module this fall at St Andrews Claude Code and I put together an online interactive map of the Japanese empire.

Anyone making a map of the Japanese occupation of China, or more generally of the wartime Japanese empire as a whole has a few ways they can go about it.

If, like me you have always wanted some good stats and a picture to explain land reform in Taiwan, here you go.

Can AI do history?

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…

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?

If you do Republican period Chinese history you know that the various versions of the Chinese state loved graphical representations of data.

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.

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.

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.