Synopses & Reviews
This compelling text explores the development of China and Japan through their art, religion, literature, and thought as well as through their economic, political, and social history. This author team combines strong research with extensive classroom teaching experience to offer a clear, consistent, and highly readable text that is accessible to students with no previous knowledge of the history of East Asia.
About the Author
Conrad Schirokauer, Senior Scholar and Adjunct Professor at Columbia University and Professor Emeritus at the City University of New York, received his doctorate from Stanford. He has studied in Paris and conducted research in Japan and China. His published papers and articles deal mostly with Song intellectual history. He is co-editor, with Robert Hymes, of ORDERING THE WORLD: APPROACHES TO STATE AND SOCIETY IN SUNG DYNASTY CHINA (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993). His current research is on Song perceptions of and attitudes toward history. Schirokauer was associated with a New York University summer graduate program for teachers in Japan and China and remains interested in how history is taught and written. As a textbook author, he has published A BRIEF HISTORY OF CHINESE AND JAPANESE CIVILIZATIONS (Second Edition 1989), with separate volumes on China (1990) and Japan (1993), all now available from Wadsworth. Also worth mention, is his translation of CHINA'S EXAMINATION HELL by Miyazaki Ichisada (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1976,1981), which he recommends to any student who feels burdened by examinations.Miranda Brown received her B.A., M.A., and Ph.D. from the Department of History, University of California, Berkeley. She now teaches early Chinese culture in the Department of Asian Languages and Cultures at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. Before coming to Michigan, she studied in China, France, and Japan. Her published work has dealt with the history of the family in pre-modern China, as well as elite burial practices. She is currently finishing a manuscript that examines early imperial political culture through elite mourning practices, and she looks forward to beginning work on a new book that will critically analyze early debates about the proper sources, role, and possibilities of human knowledge.David Lurie received a B.A. in Literature from Harvard University and an M.A. and Ph.D. in Japanese Literature from Columbia University. He teaches Japanese history and literature in the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures at Columbia University. His research concerns the history of writing systems in Japan, and more broadly, in pre-modern East Asia; he also works on the cultural and intellectual history of Japan through the Heian period. He is currently completing a manuscript entitled "Realms of Literacy: Early Japan and the History of Writing," and is also working on a project analyzing the interconnections among biography, historiography, education, and the production and circulation of texts in Nara and Heian period Japan.Suzanne Gay is Professor of East Asian Studies at Oberlin College. Her research interests include the social and economic history of medieval Japan, with a particular emphasis on the role of commoners in history. Her monography, THE MONEYLENDERS OF LATE MEDIEVAL KYOTO, was published by University of Hawaii Press in 2001. She is currently working on the history of two merchant families of medieval Kyoto, and her next project will focus on commerce and pilgrimage in the Oyamazaki area southwest of Kyoto.
Table of Contents
I. The Classical Civilization of China 1. "China" in Antiquity 2. Turbulent Times and Classical Thought 3. The Early Imperial Period The Qin The Han II. China and Japan in a Buddhist Age 4. China during the Period of Disunity 5. The Cosmopolitan Civilization of the Sui and Tang: 581-907 6. Early Japan to 794 Prehistory The Emergency of the Japanese State and Elite Culture 7. Heian Japan III. A New and Crucial Phase 8. China during the Song: 960-1279 9. The Mongol Empire and The Yuan Dynasty 10. The Ming Dynasty: 1368-1644 11. The Kamakura Period in Japan 12. Muromachi Japan 13. East Asia and Modern Europe: First Encounters IV. Last Dynasties 14. Tokugawa: Background, Establishment, and Middle Years The Legacy of War Unification and Consolidation (1573-1651) The Tokugawa Political Consolidation (1600-1653) The Middle Years (1653-1787) 15. The Qing Dynasty V. China and Japan in the Modern World 16. China: The Troubled Nineteenth Century The Opium War and Taiping Rebellion 1870-1894 Foreign Relations 17. Japan: Endings and Beginnings: From Tokugawa to Meiji, 1787-1873 Late Tokugawa The Meiji Restoration 18. The Emergence of Modern Japan: 1874-1894 19. China: Endings and Beginnings, 1894-1927 The Last Years of the Last Dynasty From Yuan Shikai to Chiang Kai-shek 20. Imperial Japan: 1895-1931 Late Meiji (1895-1912) The Taisho Period (1912-1926) and the 1920s 21. The 1930s and World War II VI. East Asia Since World War II 22. The Aftermath of the War and Unfinished Business Toward a New Order in China and Japan Unfinished Business: Korea and Vietnam 23. China under Mao Consolidation and Construction Soviet Style, 1949-1958 The Revolution Continued, 1958-1976 24. The Chinese World Since Mao 25. The New Japan The New Japan (1952-1989) Society, Thought, and the Arts From 1989 into the New Century Afterword International Tensions Economic Globalization Contending Trends Cultural Globalization