During Professor Dube’s lecture on China from 1800- 1950, he asked the question “Can we change the past?”

The answer is of course no, but what we can change is the perception of the past. He then discussed the 3 reasons for why the stories from history are often revised.

1)    New data causes revision to history

2)    New people (new generations, different cultures) asking about the past cause people to rethink history

3)    New questions being asked cause a deeper look into history (i.e. Were there women at this time period? What about the poor during this time? Etc.)

This could be an interesting lesson with students on how we understand/ tell history. If I think all the way back to Dube’s first lecture, we looked at 2 different versions of maps in textbooks from a Japanese perspective versus Korean perspective that wanted to claim the East Sea or Sea of Japan. This may be an example of how history can be “revised” depending on the story that is told. This question about changing the past may also be interesting in introducing the meaning of historical revisionism before then looking at an unorthodox version of an historical event.

Good question on who invented gun powder and who had invented the cannon.  The old one about the Chinese inventing gunpowder for religious ceremony and the Europeans finally making it into the killing machine we all have today has been thrown out there for some time and even shows up still, someone is still promoting this storyline.

Recent historical articles and discussion has a bit more of a complex story.  Like Clay said, the Song and the Tang were using cannons and gunpowder in battle and then it traveled along the Silk Roads, made it into the Islamic Abbasid Empire and used by Muslim armies in Spain and at Constantinople and of course very successfully by the Mongols.

Finally it makes it into Euorpe and is used by a Swiss army attacking an Italian town, and soon every European kingdom wants it.  What recent research has pointed out is that the European development was tied to the church bell bronze casting industry that was already going and the access to coal and copper mines that allowed them to further the casting of bronze cannons.  So bell makers quickly became cannon makers.  Not sure how superior that is, but for a long time it was the story that the Europeans took what the Chinese had no idea about and made it useful.

 http://www.themcs.org/weaponry/cannon/cannon.htm

This is a great discussion to have with our students.  Who gets to write this history?  Who gets to say who is superior?  And why is weapons technology equated with cultural superiority?

The two Chinese leaders, on opposite idealogical sides, Sun Yatsen and Kang Youwei, spent a lot of their time outside of China trying to build support for their ideas for China’s future. Both were mobilizing and raising money. Sun Yatsen wanted an all-out revolution, whereas Kang Youwei wanted more conservative reform. This was a good strategy because attempting to do this within China was extremely dangerous, a life and death threat, in fact. Additionally, by taking the effort outside of China, Sun Yatsen was able to gain support from Americans, who saw Japan’s growth as a good model for China, but also as a threat to the United States. Homer Lea was one of the supporters of Sun Yatsen’s Revolution and helped mobilize Chinese-American soldiers to support the Revolution, all of this was taking place in Los Angeles, on Sunset Blvd, no less! I think students would find this very interesting to learn about, especially because this brings the Chinese Revolution home. 

Here, Mao clearly and simply states the dual goal of the Communist Revolution, to create a new society and new state for the Chinese nation. The way Mao explains it, this requires a new China culturally, politically, and economically.

I personally enjoyed how Mao gave so much information in so few words. He references the events and ideas that we've covered in this seminar (e.g., defining the role of the imperial family post-1842 and foreign hegemony).

He also defines China in a way that is clear, feudal, colonial, semi-feudal, and semi-colonial.

I can see this topic of discussion expanding further into the issue/reality of students being constantly data-mined through their internet usage. In addition to this, any institution of credit or app often asks to access certain personal information that can be attained and shared to other 3rd parties. The Chinese government is notorious for it's impressive ability to censor the internet content from Chinese citizens. My personal experience and time in China has shown me that even a VPN connection is slow and frustrating. 

This topic could be a good segway into a discussion or analysis of ways in which other governments have often raised public concern in the infringement of individual rights and freedoms/privacy (ie Big Ben, Patriot Act, etc). I ultimately imagine that this topic could lead students to project what the future for them might look like based on the actions and responses of people around the world historically. Will there be a push towards more government intervention with the wild-west that is the world wide web? 

The White Paper Excerpt: United States Position in China provides information about America's financial involvement in China prior to the communist take over.  This excerpt was written by Dean Acheson who was Secretary of State in 1949 and was considered a central figure in creating foreign policies for America.  Dean Acheson wrote about the destruction of the Nationalist Party due to their "regime without faith in itself and an army without morale" and the rise of a well-disciplined and patriotic Communist Party.  He deflects any blame for America and instead list the substantial amount of financial aid America provided for their ally which was still not enough for the Nationalist Party to maintain their power in China.  I would chunk the reading for my students and then review their findings as a class.  I would group the students into multiple groups with different parts of the reading and then have the groups with the same excerpt to come together to share their findings with each other.  This gives students an opportunity to share their ideas and maybe form new ones.  After this is done, the class will gather back together and have a class discussion about each of the chunks and hopefully be able to piece the parts back into one.

I often consider the question of "who gets to write the history" as the historian's equivalent question of "which came first; the chicken or the egg?" I am a firm believer that digging into who wrote a history is a necessary skill and lens that each student must develop in order to determine the validity of a historical source. As we all know, the victors often write the books. Too long has K-12 history education been painted in this color. It is high time that people (beginning and/or continuing with this generation of students) start to see history in a more nuanced and balanced perspective. Any history that is cut off from context and lacking in a diversity of voices is an incomplete history. With that little tangent in mind, I think that asking "why weapons technology is equated with cultural superiority" is a pertinent and important question.