Upcoming Events
Past Events
Chinese Wars in the American Archives: Research Strategies and Resources for Historical Inquiry from the Sino-Japanese War to the Cold War
Room 5583
In this talk, Evan Taylor will share archival research methods developed over a decade of work for publishing companies, academic databases, and individual scholarship; how to locate relevant document collections, prepare for a visit to an archive or library, maximize your time on location, duplicate material, and organize it for use in the future. He will also discuss a selection of valuable yet little known primary source collections relevant to the Sino-Japanese War and the Cold War of all media types, from documents to photographs, motion pictures, audio, and maps. This will include an introduction to material such as the color films of the CBI theater shot by OSS field teams, the reports of U.S. military personnel stationed in Yan’an, war planning maps produced by both the U.S. 14th Air Force and the Japanese military, the State Department’s 1950s internal investigation files of Foreign Service Officers in China, CIA recordings of Chinese, North Korean, and North Vietnamese international shortwave radio broadcasts, U.S. Army prisoner of war interrogation reports from the Korean War, and more. READ MORE...
Seminar - Contingent Event Causality: Did Civilian Massacres Trigger Nationalist Revolutions in India (1919) and China (1925)?
Room 3401 (Lift 2 or Lifts 17-18), 3/F Academic Building
Critical events in politics—defined as sudden and surprising occurrences that trigger a chain of events leading to a significant and unanticipated outcome—are undertheorized for their causal properties, or regarded as random occurrences that cannot be brought under theoretical propositions. This paper examines two events in which lethal repression was used by security forces against unarmed protestors. It considers the claim, often noted in subsequent nationalist narratives, that the massacres triggered the radicalization of nationalist movements in India (1919) and China (1925). Using process tracing and counterfactual analysis, the paper asks to what extent the shootings constitute necessary and/or sufficient conditions for the subsequent realignment of the nationalist movements and surprising concessions made by imperial Great Britain. The paper also considers the effort in social science research to look for general causes to explain outcomes across multiple cases, in contrast to within-case analysis of non-generalizable historical events as explanatory factors READ MORE...