Discovering History in China PDF Download

Author: Paul A. Cohen
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 0231151926
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 316

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Book Description
Originally published: New York: Columbia University Press, 1984.

Author: Paul A. Cohen
Publisher: Psychology Press
ISBN: 9780415298223
Category : China
Languages : en
Pages : 242

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Book Description
This volume contains a number of articles on modern Chinese history and historiography written by one of the leading academic experts on the subject. The author provides a critique of older approaches to nineteenth-century history and offers powerful reinterpretations of such key events in the recent history of China as the boxer rebellion, Mao's ascension to power in 1949, and the process of political and economic reform in the post-Mao era. This is a strong collection which will be of enormous interest to scholars of East Asian history.

Author: Paul A. Cohen
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 9780231106504
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 460

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Book Description
Part Two explores the thought, feelings, and behavior of the direct participants in the Boxer experience, individuals who, without a preconceived idea of the entire event, understood what was happening to them in a manner fundamentally different from historians.

Author: Paul A. Cohen
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 0520265831
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 386

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Book Description
The ancient story of King Goujian, a psychologically complex 5th-century BCE monarch, spoke powerfully to the Chinese during the 20th century, but remains little known in the West. This book explores the story's connections to the major traumas of the 20th century, and also considers why such stories remain unknown to outsiders.

Author: Ssu-yü Teng
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 9780674120259
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 312

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Book Description
Contains primary source material.

Author: Paul A Cohen
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 0231537298
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 301

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Book Description
When people experience a traumatic event, such as war or the threat of annihilation, they often turn to history for stories that promise a positive outcome to their suffering. During World War II, the French took comfort in the story of Joan of Arc and her heroic efforts to rid France of foreign occupation. To bring the Joan narrative more into line with current circumstances, however, popular retellings modified the original story so that what people believed took place in the past was often quite different from what actually occurred. Paul A. Cohen identifies this interplay between story and history as a worldwide phenomenon, found in countries of radically different cultural, religious, and social character. He focuses here on Serbia, Israel, China, France, the Soviet Union, and Great Britain, all of which experienced severe crises in the twentieth century and, in response, appropriated age-old historical narratives that resonated with what was happening in the present to serve a unifying, restorative purpose. A central theme in the book is the distinction between popular memory and history. Although vitally important to historians, this distinction is routinely blurred in people's minds, and the historian's truth often cannot compete with the power of a compelling story from the past, even when it has been seriously distorted by myth or political manipulation. Cohen concludes by suggesting that the patterns of interaction he probes, given their near universality, may well be rooted in certain human propensities that transcend cultural difference.

Author: Jenny Liu
Publisher: Running Press
ISBN: 9781561387854
Category : Juvenile Nonfiction
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
Open the chest's secret compartment to reveal a brush and ink set and instructions for making Chinese characters, I Ching coins used to tell the future, a Chinese fan to decorate, plus charts, stickers, and more.

Author: Paul A Cohen
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 023152546X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 316

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Book Description
Since its first publication, Paul A. Cohen's Discovering History in China has occupied a singular place in American China scholarship. Translated into three East Asian languages, the volume has become essential to the study of China from the early nineteenth century to today. Cohen critiques the work of leading postwar scholars and is especially adamant about not reading China through the lens of Western history. To this end, he uncovers the strong ethnocentric bias pervading the three major conceptual frameworks of American scholarship of the 1950s and 1960s: the impact-response, modernization, and imperialism approaches. In place of these, Cohen favors a "China-centered" approach in which historians understand Chinese history on its own terms, paying close attention to Chinese historical trajectories and Chinese perceptions of their problems, rather than a set of expectations derived from Western history. In an important new introduction, Cohen reflects on his fifty-year career as a historian of China and discusses major recent trends in the field. Although some of these developments challenge a narrowly conceived China-centered approach, insofar as they enable more balanced comparisons between China and the West and recast the Chinese and their history in more human, less exotic terms, they powerfully affirm the central thrust of Cohen's work.

Author: Jonathan D. Spence
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 9780393307801
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 1054

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Book Description
This work chronicles the history of China for over four hundred years through the spring of 1989.

Author: Harold Miles Tanner
Publisher: Hackett Publishing
ISBN: 0872209156
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 626

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Book Description
A deep and rigorous, yet eminently accessible introduction to the political, social, and cultural development of imperial Chinese civilisation, this volume develops a number of important themes -- such as the ethnic diversity of the early empires -- that other editions omit entirely or discuss only minimally. Includes a general introduction, chronology, bibliography, illustrations, maps, and an index.