One new feature I’m trying to kick off here at The Granite Studio is an entirely biased and hugely subjective review of some of my favorite historians of China. These are the writers and scholars who influenced me when I began studying Chinese history and who continue to serve as inspirations as I continue my own career in the field.
Given my research interests, I’m starting with Paul Cohen. It was a footnote in his first book, China and Christianity: The Missionary Movement and the Growth of Chinese Anti-foreignism, 1860-1870 that was the original impetus for my dissertation, and I still re-read Professor Cohen’s seminal work on the subject about once every six months or so.
But of his many works, perhaps my favorite is a slim volume he published in 1984, not about Chinese history per se, but about the study of Chinese history in the American academy. To briefly and inadequately summarize, Discovering History in China: American Historical Writing on the Recent Chinese Past ambitiously breaks down the collective oeuvre of American academic writing on China since World War II into three distinct generations based on the predominant mode of analysis at the time: “China’s Response to the