Asian History Commons^™

The Yellow Emperor’S Inner Transmission Of Acupuncture By Zhenhai Yang (Review), David Luesink

History Faculty Publications

Review of The Yellow Emperor’s Inner Transmission of Acupuncture.

ISBN: 9789882371132

Trickle Down Nationalism: Interactions Between Liberal Nationalism And Colonialism In The Raj And Nigeria, Aaryaman Sheoran

CMC Senior Theses

The combination of nationalism and colonialism has remained understudied in academia, despite the important interaction between the two phenomena. European ideas bled over into their colonial empires and began to fill the power vacuum created by colonial enterprises. This study analyzes the impact of British colonialism on the development of national identity in British India and Nigeria.

British influences included large scale economic disruption, cultural reform through ‘westernizing’ the population and abolishing local customs, and creating a new set of institutions to replace traditional power centers. Inevitably, these factors created a nationalist surge across both the Raj and Nigeria, as …

Remembering The City: An Augmented Reality Reconstruction Of Memory, Power, And Identity In Ho Chi Minh City Through Cartography & Architecture, Thuy Dinh

Senior Independent Study Theses

Cartography and architecture are official channels that facilitate remembrance in Ho Chi Minh City. Maps and buildings serve as sites for actors of memory to manipulate the city's narratives and shape its collective identity. Power enables the production of space and knowledge through sites of memory. The ruling regimes of Ho Chi Minh City have leveraged control over the natural environment and the local population to create new forms of materials that propagate their ideologies and ideals for the city. Alterations to the natural and built environments in the city legitimize the authorities' official narratives for its history and future …

Enduring The Unendurable: Examining Cultural Trauma In Postwar Japanese Film, Joseph Worstall

Capstone Showcase

WWII and its aftermath fundamentally changed the collective consciousness of the Japanese people. For the first time in history, and at a tremendous cost, the country was vanquished. By the end of the war, sixty-seven cities had been firebombed, three million people had been killed, and millions more found themselves suffering from poverty, hunger, and homelessness. Most controversially, the USAAF dropped atomic bombs on the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki—two acts which have been so universally condemned that they’ve never been repeated. For the next seven years, the U.S. armed forces occupied the country and charted its course, effectively operating …

Selling Sex In A Culture Of Convergence: Prostitution In The French Concession Of Shanghai, Lance Pederson

Departmental Honors Projects

From 1849 to 1943, both Chinese and European prostitutes lived and worked in Shanghai’s French Concession, catering to all the ethnic groups in the city. After the establishment of foreign concessions placed Shanghai under semi-colonial control, French and Chinese culture combined in this area of the city to create a unique urban landscape that was unlike anywhere else in the world. This differentiated prostitution in the French Concession from prostitution in other parts of Shanghai. Over the years, historians have written extensively on how prostitution changed and flourished in Shanghai as a whole, but few focused on the French concession …

Killing Within Communities: What Causes Collective Violence, How We Remember It, And Why It Matters, Laleh Ahmad

CMC Senior Theses

This thesis seeks to understand motivations for collective violence beyond the traditional explanations of ethnic hatred or racism. Often, historical scholarship focuses on ethnic hatred and racism, and elaborates on the processes by which those notions and hatreds came to be. Scholarship in the political science realm often gets past the hatred hypothesis but does not explore historical myths and legacy formation as they contribute to past and current violence. This thesis employs a case study approach to understand collective violence that is global and takes multiple cultures and religions into account. The case studies were chosen thematically, and each …

Confucian Thought And Contemporary Western Philosophy, Andrew Lambert

Publications and Research

This chapter explores the encounter between the traditional Confucian thought and contemporary Anglophone philosophy. It explores the evolution in philosophical methods and heuristics employed by Anglophone thinkers in the past fifty or so years, often with the aim of extracting Confucian thought from its specific social and historical roots. Unlike the disciplines of intellectual or literary history, these philosophers have articulated dimensions of Confucian philosophy not explicit in traditional texts, developed critiques of Western modernity, derived solutions to problems in Western philosophy, and sought to reimagine Confucian thought for an East Asian modernity. Analyzing how contemporary philosophers have engaged the …

Humayun Ahmed And Archival Hauntings: The Subaltern Experience Of The 1971 Liberation War Of Bangladesh As Portrayed In Debi, Nilima Islam

Dissertations and Theses

In this paper, I argue how Humayun Ahmed's Debi offers insight into the function that archives play in creating radical nationalism in a country like Bangladesh; how these archives work to consolidate political power for a select few, and how they further subjugate and silence the country’s subalterns.

The Modern Formulation Of Chinese Art History And The Building Of A Nation In Early Twentieth-Century China, Chennie Huang

Dissertations and Theses

At the dawn of the twentieth century, the Chinese formulation of art history underwent dramatic changes. It moved away from the traditional narratives that did not follow a strict chronology to adopt the Western linear model which emphasizes progress and national identity. Based on the premodern tradition, the modern formulations of Chinese art history began as a political strategy for nation building amid the political upheavals, including military attacks on China that led to the end of Qing imperial rule and the beginning of the Republican era (1912-1949).

In the early 1900s, while exiled in Japan, Liang Qichao 梁啟超 (1873-1929), …

Village-Temple Consciousness In Two Jaffna Tamil Villages In Post-War Sri Lanka, Pathmanesan Sanmugeswaran

Theses and Dissertations--Anthropology

This dissertation investigates how community rebuilding is occurring in a gravely damaged, post-conflict society. Specifically, it looks at how people in two villages in Tamil, Hindu, Jaffna, Sri Lanka, are using their ‘sense of place’ and ‘place-making practices’ or what I call here their ‘village-temple consciousness’ or village consciousness, to maintain and rebuild their communities after war to make them, once again, places in which they feel a comfortable sense of belonging. This is a comparative study because Inuvil and Naguleswaram were affected differently by the Sri Lankan civil war. That is, while Inuvil, was physically damaged and socially disrupted …

Synchrony: An Aspect Of The Abilities Of Steppe Horse Archers In Eurasian Warfare (525 Bce – 1350 Ce), Chris Hanson

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

Animals moving in unison as a group are quite intriguing to observe. Horses can run across terrain and change directions without jostling each other. They appear to move as if they know how to avoid crashing into others and run fluidly through their environment. This ability to maneuver without hindering herd is called synchrony and also extends to other animals including fish in schools and birds in flocks. Humans, on the other hand, need to create orderly formations in battle to move without interfering with adjacent warriors. For example, the Romans, Greeks, Persians, Chinese, and Byzantines trained their infantry and …

The Batavia Massacre: The Tragic End To A Century Of Cooperation, Kimberly Wilhelmina Wells

Graduate Theses/Dissertations

From its establishment in 1602, the Dutch East India Company (VOC) was an extensive and powerful trading company that sought to gain a monopoly over the spice trade in Southeast Asia, often using coercion to do so. In 1619 the VOC established its central base of operations in Batavia on the Indonesian island of Java. From the start, the VOC pursued a relationship of cooperation with the Chinese merchants in Batavia, which eschewed the use of violence in favor of other means of control, such as taxation and requirements to register with the authorities. For one hundred and twenty-one years, …

Review Of China Tripping: Encountering The Everyday In The People’S Republic, Byron Williams

History in the Making

No abstract provided.

Confucius’ Timeless Analects, Federico Guevara

History in the Making

No abstract provided.

The Soft Power Practices Of The Ming Dynasty And Zheng He’S First Voyage, Peter Weisser

History in the Making

This article will examine the soft power aspects of Zheng He’s life as well as the soft power efforts of the People’s Republic of China in the modern day, using Zheng He as an example to show the historical parallels between the two while examining the motivations of the PRC which is a search for legitimacy. This article will look into the parallels that exist between Zheng He and the soft power practiced in the fifteenth and twenty-first centuries within China. Furthermore, the perceptions and meanings of soft power in China may be different than that of other nations or …

Imperial Fastballs: The Cultural Imperialism Of American Baseball, Cameron Van Note

History in the Making

From the eighteenth and nineteenth century Imperialism was a major instigator for conflict across the globe, being split into many different subcategories such as economic, cultural, and military imperialism. This paper looks at the aspect of American Baseball being used as a tool of cultural imperialism over Japan prior to, and well after, World War II. Baseball in Japan was different than other examples of Imperialism because of how Japan accepted and integrated baseball culture into their own, resulting in Japanese and American players bonding over the culture surrounding the game. It was not easy to form these bonds however, …

Zheng He And The American Liberal Arts Education: Contexts And Complications, Marla Lunderberg

Faculty Publications

Zheng He was a eunuch of Moslem family heritage who held great authority early in the Ming Dynasty, primarily under the Yongle emperor (reign: 1402–24), as he led seven maritime expeditions, of which three reached the eastern coast of Africa. Of recent English language projects on Zheng He, Henry Tsai (1996) explores the context of the eunuchs of the Ming Dynasty in defining Zheng He’s work, and Edward Dreyer (2007) and Timothy Brook (2010) portray Zheng He within the context of the Chinese tributary system. However, other images also hold power over the Western imagination: Louise Levathes (1994) portrays Zheng …

Book Review: The Untold History Of Ramen: How Political Crisis In Japan Spawned A Global Food Craze By George Solt. Berkley: University Of California Press, 2014., Daniel Stolp

History in the Making

No abstract provided.

Manchus: A Horse Of A Different Color, Hannah Knight

History in the Making

The question of identity has been one of the biggest questions addressed to humanity. Whether in terms of a country, a group or an individual, the exact definition is almost as difficult to answer as to what constitutes a group. The Manchus, an ethnic group in China, also faced this dilemma. It was an issue that lasted throughout their entire time as rulers of the Qing Dynasty (1644- 1911) and thereafter. Though the guidelines and group characteristics changed throughout that period one aspect remained clear: they did not sinicize with the Chinese Culture. At the beginning of their rule, the …

Comparative Book Review: Chopsticks And The Land Of The Five Flavors, Jacob P, Banda

History in the Making

No abstract provided.