Asian History Commons^™

Full Issue: Volume 2, Issue 1, Editorial Board

Swarthmore Undergraduate History Journal

The first issue in the second volume of the Swarthmore Undergraduate History Journal.

China’S Illegal Organ Trade: From Executed Prisoners To Organ Tourism To Falun Gong, Adrienne Thompson

West Virginia University Historical Review

As worldwide populations continue to rise, the constant necessity for life-saving organs for terminally and chronically ill patients has become extremely vital and profitable to medical centers across the globe. Since China’s preliminary debut in the international organ donation and transplantation system in the late 1960s, various scholars, journalists, and health professionals across the globe have demonstrated outright shock at the massive influx and seemingly endless supply of transferable organs emanating from Chinese transplant centers and hospitals. Investigations have shown that China has been actively harvesting organs from recently executed prisoners and incarcerated Falun Gong practitioners. Regardless of numerous outside …

Into The Field: Human Scientists Of Transwar Japan. By Miriam Kingsberg Kadia. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2020. Xviii, 317 Pp. Isbn: 9781503610613 (Cloth, Also Available In Paper And As E-Book), Alexander Bay

History Faculty Articles and Research

A book review of Miriam Kingsberg Kadia's Into the Field: Human Scientists of Transwar Japan.

Full Issue: Volume 1, Issue 1, Editorial Board

Swarthmore Undergraduate History Journal

The first issue of the Swarthmore Undergraduate History Journal.

"Founding Its Empire On Spells Of Pleasure": Brunonian Excitability, The Invigorated English Opium-Eater, And De Quincey's "China Question", Menglu Gao

English and Literary Arts: Faculty Scholarship

What light can De Quincey's Confessions of an English Opium-Eater (1821) shed on its author's later advocacy of the First Opium War? To what degree did De Quincey's and other contemporaneous accounts of opium use in Britain influence metaphorical connections between bodily energy and national power in the 1830s and 1840s? Placing Confessions alongside John Brown's 1780 treatise, Elements of Medicine, this essay argues that De Quincey "nationalized" opium-eating by transforming mental exceptionality in British Romanticism into a medical body's connection with internal energies and external stimuli from China and "the Orient." The essay concludes that opium serves in …

Succor In Smoke: A Historical And Comparative Analysis Of Incense And Moxibustion As Similar Agents Of Edification And Self-Cultivation, Hannah E. Matulek

Black & Gold

Since its origins in the Shang Dynasty nearly 3,000 years ago, traditional Chinese medicine has undergone many dramatic shifts and adapted to a wide range of cultural, social, religious and foreign pressures. One of the most notable changes is the attribution of the etiology of disease (as well as general poor health and behaviors) from volatile and dissatisfied external forces to manageable internal forces. This allowed for a flourishing of thought in Chinese medicine, for once granting an individual the power to influence his or her own health. Three religions—Confucianism, Buddhism, and Taoism—were also introduced to China at this time, …

The Hopes And The Realities Of Aviation In French Indochina, 1919-1940, Gregory Charles Seltzer

Theses and Dissertations--History

My dissertation examines how and why the French employed aviation in the five constituent parts of French Indochina (Annam, Cambodia, Cochinchina, Laos, and Tonkin) during the interwar period of the 1920s and 1930s. I argue that the French, believing that the modern technology of powered flight possessed seemingly endless potential, saw aviation as a vehicle for extending, consolidating, developing, and protecting their interests both within the colony and around Southeast and East Asia. Aircraft, whether civil or military, were viewed and used as a multi-purpose tool of empire. Indeed, planes were employed for a variety of tasks in Indochina: transportation …

Chao Yuanfang: Imperial Physician Of The Sui Dynasty And An Early Pertussis Observer?, Yan Liang, Abdulbaset M. Salim, Wendy Wu, Paul E. Kilgore

Department of Pharmacy Practice

Early Chinese texts contain extensive disease descriptions, including various texts that contain descriptions of modernday conditions. During the Sui Dynasty, a leading scholar, Chao Yuanfang, may have authored a leading treatise 1400 years ago. Although these texts are the subject of ongoing research, evidence suggests that a clinical syndrome consistent with pertussis was observed in ancient China.

Pandey's Method Of Cube Root Extraction: Is It Better Than Aryabhata’S Method?, Deepak Basyal

Mathematics and Statistics

We compare two methods of cube root extraction: one proposed by the Nepali mathematician Gopal Pandey in the 19th century, which uses proportionality, and another one provided by the Indian mathematician and astronomer Aryabhata.

Hiroshima. At The Intersection Of Sciences, History, And Personal Narratives. A Personal Reflection., Gloria R. Montebruno Saller

The Transdisciplinary STEAM+ Journal

In the city of Hiroshima, Japan, sciences, history, and personal narratives meet. Atomic bomb survivors became the keepers of this town’s history and one of the most tragic chapters in the history of humankind; and as their voices fade to old age and death, there is a sense of urgency to keep their narratives alive. These are my personal reflections.

Is China A Responsible Developing Country? Climate Change Diplomacy And National Image Building, Sanna Kopra

Global Asia Journal

A state’s image is an important resource for wielding national power in global politics. Its prestige and reputation often influence the interactions with other states. As an emerging superpower, China is under pressure to shoulder more responsibility for tackling global climate change. The West has criticized China as a “climate criminal” that threatens global climate stability. In response, the Chinese government implemented a series of comprehensive programs to improve its image abroad. This paper examines China’s national image building in the realm of international climate politics. It draws on the official rhetoric and policy statements to discuss the innovative strategies …

The Silent Arms Race: The Role Of The Supercomputer During The Cold War, 1947-1963, David Warren Kirsch

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

One of the central features of the Cold War is the "Arms Race." The United States and the Union of Soviet Socialist republics vied for supremacy over the globe for a fifty-year period in which there were several arms races; atomic weapons, thermonuclear weapons and various kinds of conventional weapons. However, there is another arms race that goes unsung during this period of history and that is in the area of supercomputing. The other types of arms races are taken for granted by historians and others, but the technological competition between the superpowers would have been impossible without the historically …

Totalitarian Science And Technology, Paul R. Josephson

Faculty Books

In Totalitarian Science and Technology Paul Josephson considers how physicists, biologists, and engineers have fared in totalitarian regimes. Adolph Hitler and Joseph Stalin relied on scientists and engineers to build the infrastructure of their states. The military power of their regimes was largely based on the discovery of physicists and biologists. They sought to use biology to transform nature, including their citizens, with murderous effect in Nazi Germany. They expected scientists to devote themselves entirely to the goals of the state, and were intolerant of deviation from state-sponsored programs and ideology. As a result, physicists, biologists, and engineers suffered from …

Freedom Railway: The Unexpected Successes Of A Cold War Development Project, Jamie Monson

History Faculty Work

No abstract provided.

Church Of The Brethren China Relief, Circa 2002, E. Joseph Wampler, D. Eugene Wampler

Digitized Primary Sources

This compiled manuscript details work by Church of the Brethren missionaries and relief workers in China from 1918 to 1951. Missionaries and relief workers include Ernest M. Wampler, nurse Elizabeth Baker Wampler, Dr. Frederick Jacob Wampler, Rebecca Skeggs Wampler, Nettie Mabelle Senger, and Howard E. Sollenberger.

Work chronicled here includes relief in a 1918 bubonic plague outbreak in the Shanxi province, care in the 1920 – 1921 Great Famine in Northern China, work with Chinese road builders, missionary Nettie Mabelle Senger’s wool cooperative, several of Howard Sollenberger’s projects, relief during the Sino-Japanese War, the 1942-43 Henan relief effort, and postwar …

New Atlantis Revisited: Akademgorodok, The Siberian City Of Science, Paul R. Josephson

Faculty Books

In 1958 construction began on Akademgorodok, a scientific utopian community modeled after Francis Bacon's vision of a "New Atlantis." The city, carved out of a Siberian forest 2,500 miles east of Moscow, was formed by Soviet scientists with Khrushchev's full support. They believed that their rational science, liberated from ideological and economic constraints, would help their country surpass the West in all fields. In a lively history of this city, a symbol of de-Stalinization, Paul Josephson offers the most complete analysis available of the reasons behind the successes and failures of Soviet science--from advances in nuclear physics to politically induced …

War Weapons As An Index Of Contemporary Knowledge Of The Nature And Significance Of Craniocerebral Trauma: Some Notes On Striking Weapons Designed Primarily To Produce Injury To The Head, Cyril B. Courville

Medical Arts and Sciences: A Scientific Journal of the College of Medical Evangelists

No abstract provided.