Designed for the East Asian history course, this text features the latest scholarship on the region’s cultural, political, economic, and intellectual history. Coverage is balanced among East Asian countries, with approximately 20 percent of the text focused on Korea, an area that has become increasingly important in world politics.
Special attention is devoted to gender and material culture, themes are reinforced through the text’s pedagogical features. Full color inserts on topics such as food, clothing, and art objects illustrate the rich artistic heritage of East Asia and bolster the coverage of material culture.
Features include a range of primary source documents on topics such as women’s independence and students-turned-soldiers, and biographical sketches throughout the text highlight the lives of popular figures and ordinary people. “Connections” features provide an international context for the history of East Asia, including topics such the origin and spread of Buddhism and a global perspective of World War II.
The authors take a grand sweep across half of Asia and thousands of years. They cover 3 countries – China, Japan and Korea. By virtue of geographic size and population, China receives the greatest coverage. Its long sequence of dynasties are covered in impressive detail. Not just in the political and military events of those eras. The book also devotes space to explaining the religious and philosophical changes. Notably the Analects of Confucius, Daoism, the incursion of Buddhism from India into China, which finally adopted it as its own.
There is also extensive coverage of Japanese civilisation. While derived from Chinese, it soon adopted its own unique features, including the Shinto version of Buddhism.
The book also has memorable titbits of historical detail, some of which may be stick in the reader’s memory. Maybe like in medieval Japan, where landlords might segregate toilets by sex, because men’s excrement was more highly valued by farmers than women’s.
About the Author
Patricia B. Ebrey, Professor with Joint Appointment: Early Imperial China, Song Dynasty, at the University of Washington in Seattle, received her Ph.D. from Columbia University in 1975. She has published numerous journal articles and published The Cambridge Illustrated History of China (Cambridge University Press, 1996). Her monographs include The Inner Quarters: Marriage and the Lives of Chinese Women in the Sung Period (University of California Press, 1993) and Confucianism and Family Rituals in Imperial China: A Social History of Writing about Rites (Princeton University Press, 1991). She is a co-author of East Asia: A Cultural, Social, and Political History and author of China: A Cultural, Social, and Political History (both Houghton Mifflin, 2006).
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