Faculty of Arts in the Media: Professor Charles Schencking Discusses the Bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki

Professor Charles Schencking from the Department of History was interviewed by RTHK3 Backchat on the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki following President Obama's visit to Hiroshima.

Please click on the following link for the podcast of the programme:

http://podcast.rthk.hk/podcast/item_epi.php?pid=177&lang=en-US&id=70442

Faculty of Arts in the Media: Rewriting Black American History in HKU Exhibition and Research

Source: SCMP

Hong Kong will be the first international stop of an ambitious exhibition aimed at revising 400 years of American history, and the African American couple behind the show expect its focus on the historic misrepresentation of the black community will resonate with Chinese audiences.

The Kinsey Collection will be exhibited from December 9 at the University of Hong Kong’s museum...

Among the stories made up, according to Mr Kinsey, is the common belief that all African Americans were slaves in the early days.

“We have paintings from 1865 by professional African American artists. We have a document from the late 16th century showing that descendants from the Moors in Spain were among the first settlers, years before the English settled in Jamestown. They were not slaves,” he said.

The exhibition has been seen by five million people in 21 cities within the US, including Washington, where it was shown at the Smithsonian Institution. With the country’s first African American president soon to step down, the Kinseys feel there remains much work to be done to address racial stereotypes...

HKU’s American studies and African studies programmes would tailor-make courses based on the exhibits and conduct academic research, said Derek Collins, dean of the faculty of arts at HKU.

Please click on the following link to access the original article on South China Morning Post: http://www.scmp.com/culture/arts-entertainment/article/1941712/hong-kong-outing-exhibition-aims-rewrite-black-american

Frank Dikötter Launches Final Installment in the People's Trilogy

The Cultural Revolution: A People's History, 1962–1976

Frank Dikötter

May 2016, Bloomsbury, 432 pp

After the economic disaster of the Great Leap Forward that claimed tens of millions of lives from 1958–1962, an aging Mao Zedong launched an ambitious scheme to shore up his reputation and eliminate those he viewed as a threat to his legacy. The stated goal of the Cultural Revolution was to purge the country of bourgeois, capitalistic elements he claimed were threatening genuine communist ideology. Young students formed the Red Guards, vowing to defend the Chairman to the death, but soon rival factions started fighting each other in the streets with semiautomatic weapons in the name of revolutionary purity. As the country descended into chaos, the military intervened, turning China into a garrison state marked by bloody purges that crushed as many as one in fifty people.

The Cultural Revolution: A People's History, 1962–1976 draws for the first time on hundreds of previously classified party documents, from secret police reports to unexpurgated versions of leadership speeches. Frank Dikötter uses this wealth of material to undermine the picture of complete conformity that is often supposed to have characterized the last years of the Mao era. After the army itself fell victim to the Cultural Revolution, ordinary people used the political chaos to resurrect the market and hollow out the party's ideology. In short, they buried Maoism. By showing how economic reform from below was an unintended consequence of a decade of violent purges and entrenched fear, The Cultural Revolution casts China's most tumultuous era in a wholly new light.

For the publisher's page: http://www.bloomsbury.com/us/the-cultural-revolution-9781632864215/

See more reviews on:

The Economist: http://www.economist.com/news/books-and-arts/21698632-how-maos-call-disorder-under-heaven-tore-china-asunder-heat-sun
Financial Times: http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/8b2cb53e-0d32-11e6-b41f-0beb7e589515.html
The Guardian: http://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/may/09/cultural-revolution-peoples-history-frank-dikotter-review

The Times: http://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/book-of-the-week-the-cultural-revolution-by-frank-dikotter-h0gr3bcn5
WSJ: http://www.wsj.com/articles/the-scars-of-maos-cultural-revolution-1462294170

Robert Peckham Publishes Epidemics in Modern Asia

Epidemics in Modern Asia
Robert Peckham
Apr 2016, Cambridge University Press, 374 pp.

Epidemics have played a critical role in shaping modern Asia. Encompassing two centuries of Asian history, Robert Peckham explores the profound impact that infectious disease has had on societies across the region: from India to China and the Russian Far East. The book tracks the links between biology, history, and geopolitics, highlighting infectious disease's interdependencies with empire, modernization, revolution, nationalism, migration, and transnational patterns of trade. By examining the history of Asia through the lens of epidemics, Peckham vividly illustrates how society's material conditions are entangled with social and political processes, offering an entirely fresh perspective on Asia's transformation.

Please click on the following link to access the publisher's page: http://www.cambridge.org/fr/academic/subjects/history/global-history/epidemics-modern-asia?format=PB

For author's homepage:
http://www.soh.hku.hk/peckham/home/home.php