Tag: reflections

Growing up in a fast-developing peripheral section of Florence, Italy, I first learned to associate the word ‘craft’ to the construction sites surrounding our apartment building, with some architectural marvels and many genuine eyesores.  As a kid, I was generally entranced by how new shapes—some expected, some surprising—emerged from the painstaking labor of bricklayers and…

Growing up in a fast-developing peripheral section of Florence, Italy, I first learned to associate the word ‘craft’ to the construction sites surrounding our apartment building, with some architectural marvels and many genuine eyesores.  As a kid, I was generally entranced by how new shapes—some expected, some surprising—emerged from the painstaking labor of bricklayers and…

When I began my first year as an undergraduate at Brown University in the mid-1990s, I never imagined that I would pursue a career as a historian.  Although I had always enjoyed my history classes, I entered college planning to study chemistry and math, subjects that I had loved and excelled in during high school. …

Although history was one of my favorite classes in high school, I chalked that up to an outstanding teacher, John Smith, who first taught me in an elective world history class (which today would be considered more of a comparative cultures class, since the textbook did not pay much attention to crossings or interconnections). I…

For someone who has physically been much in motion with transnational teaching and research, I am struck by the extent to which my intellectual interests have been stable.  I was and am a historian, specializing in the role of media, communication, and culture in international relations.  The short account of my career is that I…

Chapter 1: By the age of twelve, I had been a refugee twice: the first time, when my family fled Chongqing (Chungking) China in late 1949 to British Hong Kong after the Communists triumphed over Chiang Kai-shek and the Nationalists (Kuomintang or KMT)[1].  As part of the Great Exodus from China, my parents did not…

All historians are surely accidental historians.  At the most basic level, the opportunity to be a historian—at least in the more conventional understanding of the term—is the consequence of multiple accidents of timing, circumstance, and unequal opportunity: success in examinations, in grant applications, and simply being in a particular place at a particular time. But,…

My “formative years” as a historian go back to the 1950s when I studied British history in college and then U.S. and East Asian history as a graduate student.  Actually, however, it may be more correct to say that my interest in history goes back to the 1940s when the Second World War was fought…

My becoming an international historian was, as Marxists would say, overdetermined—but nevertheless I took a long time to determine it.  I did not so much decide to study international history as make a series of incremental decisions, usually driven by advice or inspiration from an intellectual mentor, that led me along that path.  So even…