491 - 500 of 788 results for: HISTORY

Cinema was invented in the 1890s and simultaneously introduced to East Asia. This colloquium explores how this new medium changed the cultural and social landscape of East Asia and how the visual power of films also affected the culture politics of empires in the region. The themes include cinema and urban spaces, cultural imperialism, film images and gender discourse, colonial modernity, Americanism and Asianism, the visual and the textual, wartime propaganda, and Hollywood movies and cold war empires.

(Students enroll for 3 OR 5 units.)The nature of borders and border conflicts in N.E. Asia from the 17th to the early 20th century. Focus is on contact zones between China, Russia, Korea, and Japan. The geopolitical imperatives that drove states to map their terrain in variable ways. Cultural, diplomatic, and imperial contexts. European pressures and contributions to E. Asian cartography; the uses of maps in surveillance, diplomacy, identity, and war. Student projects focus on a contested border zone.

This course examines the evolution of warfare in China, and its impact on the evolving political and social orders, from the earliest states through the Mongol conquest. It will study how changing military technology was inextricably linked to changes in the state and society. It will also look at changing Chinese attitudes towards warfare over the same period, from the celebration of heroism, through writing about warfare as an intellectual art, to the links of militarism with steppe peoples/

This undergraduate colloquium introduces students to the history of law in imperial China through close reading of primary sources in translation and highlights of Anglophone scholarship. We begin with legal perspectives from the Confucian and Legalist classics and the formation of early imperial legal codes. Then we focus on how law served as a field of interaction between state and society during China's last imperial dynasty, the Qing (1644-1911). Specific topics include autocracy and political crime; evidence, review, and appeals; the regulation of gender and sexual relations; the functioning of local courts; property and contract; and the informal sphere of community regulation outside the official judicial system.

Gender is crucial to understanding the political, cultural, and economic trajectories of communities in colonial and postcolonial South Asia. Throughout this course, we will ask a series of questions: How does gender structure conceptions of home, community, and homeland in South Asia? How do gender and religion become represented in movements for nation-states? How does women's participation in anticolonial politics and fights for equal representation in postcolonial nation-states affect our understanding of gender in South Asia today? Readings examine the creation and impact of religious personal law under British colonial rule, the role of masculinity in the British-Indian army, perspectives on religion and clothing, the interplay of rights movements and anti-colonialism, and the status of women in postcolonial India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh. Students will also explore a range of primary sources, including political treatises, short stories, didactic manuals, autobiographies, and travelogues.

( History 292D is an undergraduate course offered for 5 units; History 392D is a graduate course offered for 4-5 units.) How Japan and Asia mutually shaped each other in the late 19th and 20th centuries. Focus is on Japanese imperialism in Asia and its postwar legacies. Topics include: pan-Asianism and orientalism; colonial modernization in Korea and Taiwan; collaboration and resistance; popular imperialism in Manchuria; total war and empire; comfort women and the politics of apology; the issue of resident Koreans; and economic and cultural integration of postwar Asia.

This colloquium explores the major themes of Korean history before 1800 and the role of culture and religions in shaping the everyday life of Chosôn-dynasty Koreans. Themes include the aristocracy and military in the Koryô dynasty, Buddhism and Confucianism in the making of Chosôn Korea, kingship and court culture, slavery and women, family and rituals, death and punishment, and the Korean alphabet (Hangûl) and print culture.

This course explores the comparative history of queer and transgender desires, relationships, and identities through highlights of recent and classic scholarship on different periods and parts of the world.

This course examines the fundamental role of powerful goddesses in Chinese religion. It covers the entire range of imperial history and down to the present. It will look at, among other questions, what roles goddesses played in the spirit world, how this is related to the roles of human women, and why a civilization that excluded women from the public sphere granted them a dominant place, in the religious sphere. It is based entirely on readings in English.