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Historian's Toolkit

Historian's Toolkit

The Historian’s Toolkit offers a set of reference tools and learning modules that are designed to be useful to students and instructors in a wide variety of subjects and disciplines – including but not only those in courses on the history of East Asia. Our intent is to use the multimedia resources of the web to open up the world of historical documents to nonspecialists as well as scholars; to provide learning aids (maps, chronologies, and prononciation guides) to give them the vocabulary with which to discuss East Asian cultures; and to offer a glimpse of particular historical moments and patterns of change.

Brief Dynastic Chronology of China
A bilingual historical chronology by dynasty, with audio files of Mandarin pronunciations.

Document Study Unit -- Timing Modernity: 
A Chinese Calendar Advertisement of the 1920s
Explore what a single pictorial advertisement can reveal about commerce, notions of beauty, nationalism, politics, urban development, social custom and more in early twentieth century China.

Documentary Study Unit -- Envisioning Chinese Society at the Turn of the Twentieth Century: Images from the Dianshizhai Pictorial
Illustrated news items from an innovative Shanghai pictorial newspaper open a window onto Chinese society and culture -- both high and low -- during the last quarter of the nineteenth century, to sometimes startling and unusual effect.

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