By Sumit Guha Empires ancient and modern are large, hierarchical organizations, structurally founded on deep inequalities of risk and reward. The British Empire in Asia was no exception. At the front lines of imperial power were, all too often, common men (and some women) who were tricked, cozened, misled, coerced, and whipped into serving as […]
The Public Archive: Mercenary Monks
Millions of tweets and millions of state documents. Intimate oral histories and international radio addresses. Ancient pottery and yesterday’s memes. Historians have access to this immense store of online material for doing research, but what else can we do with it? In Spring 2018, graduate students in the Public and Digital History Seminar at UT […]
Nanban Art: Colonial Latin America Through Objects (No. 2)
This series features five online museum exhibits created by undergraduate and graduate students at the University of Texas at Austin for a class titled “Colonial Latin America Through Objects.” The class assumes that Latin America was never a continent onto itself. The course also insists that objects document the nature of historical change in ways […]
Violating the Rights of Humans: One Child Policy in China (1979)
Sarah Zou Sartartia Middle School Junior Division Historical Paper Read Sarah’s Paper In 1979, the Chinese government announced a new “birth planning program” under the reformist leader Deng Xiaoping. Intended to curb China’s explosive population growth, the policy mandated that each married Chinese couple (with some exceptions) have no more than one child. Birth Planning […]
Persuasion, Propaganda, and Radio Free Europe: The New Archive (No. 9)
by Charley Binkow How does a nation fight a war of ideas? When the battlefield is popular opinion, how does a state arm itself? In 1949, the United States found its answer. Their weapon: the airwaves. The CIA launched Radio Free Europe in 1949 with the hopes of encouraging Eastern Europeans to defect from the […]
Domesticating Ethnic Foods and Becoming American
How to Cook and Eat in Chinese was the earliest popular, English-language guide to Chinese cooking. First published in 1945 and reprinted several times, it remains in wide use today.
The “Knock Knock Who is There” Moment for Japan: The Signing of the Treaty of Kanagawa in 1854
In 1854, a fleet of American naval ships arrived in Japan’s Tokyo Bay. The squadron, led by Commodore Matthew C. Perry, was charged with the mission of convincing the Tokugawa shogunate to open commercial and diplomatic ties with the West.
How Taiwan Became Chinese: Dutch, Spanish, and Han Colonization in the Seventeenth Century, by Tonio Andrade (2008)
Focusing on seventeenth-century Taiwan, the island east of mainland China populated by aborigines who specialized in deer hunting, Tonio Andrade seeks to explore the theme of early modern colonization in a much larger context as part of his greater effort of analyzing global history.
Masks of Conquest: Literary Study and British Rule in India, by Gauri Viswanathan (1989)
Gauri Viswanathan provides a fascinating account of the ideological motivations behind the introduction of English literary education in British India. She studies the shifts in the curriculum and relates such developments to debates over the objectives of English education both among the British administrators, as well as between missionaries and colonial officials.
Voices of India’s Partition, Part V: Professor Mohammad Amin
During our interview Professor Amin was suffering from allergies and his nose was running constantly. He also had several attacks of sneezing. But he was patient and generous enough to continue speaking with me despite it all.