Cross-cultural “Stuff”
This Isn’t a Blog Post.
It’s a link to a website I discovered when I was procrastinating on my Really Big Project.* Global Middle Ages is the home site for a group of projects that began with a teaching experiment at the University of Texas. The charge was “to see the world whole in a large swathe of time—as a…
Read More
Daughters of the Samurai
In Daughters of the Samurai: A Journey From East to West, Janice P. Nimura tells the story of three young girls, ages eleven, ten and six, whom the Japanese government sent to the United States in 1871 as part of the westernizing reforms of the Meiji Restoration that transformed Japan in the mid-nineteenth century. The…
Read More
“Opening” Japan–The Meiji Restoration
As I’ve mentioned before, in 1853 the United States government forced Japan to open its ports to United States merchants in a literal display of gunboat diplomacy. Commodore Perry’s act of military aggression against Japan is often given credit for dragging Japan into the nineteenth century. In fact, the real credit for Japan’s transformation belongs…
Read More