User:Paul Gard/EB articles/1


 * Topics For Papers

What you write about is, within the constraints inherent in the course and your knowledge of foreign languages, up to you and is limited only by the range of your interests. The only restriction for History 371 is that your topic should be on Chinese economic history, or those aspects of Chinese social history that pertain to the nature of the Chinese ruling classes.

Your topic can deal with any period or periods of China’s economic history. You can go all the way back to Huang Ti in the 27th century BC, or Yao late in the 3rd millennium BC, or maybe to when Yu's son founded the Hsia dynasty a couple of generations later, and you can proceed right on down to the “First Red Emperor,” Mao Tse-tong and his successor, Teng Hsiao-p’ing. So you can range from Yao to Mao and beyond, just as the course's title states.

Your topic can be either on China’s domestic economy or involve international trade. A social history topic need not limit itself solely to the economic acts of the ruling classes, but can also link the social and class allegiances of non-members of the ruling classes to their roles in the market.

To come up with an explicitly defined topic and an annotated bibliography, first flip pages in the course text, pausing to read a paragraph when the spirit moves you. Then decide on a period or periods, and the actors you are most interested in. Finally, match your topic with citations of appropriate works, annotating each with a sentence or two to indicate what sorts of material you expect to get from it.

How might you find out enough about a book or article to compose such an annotation without going through the formality of actually reading it? You might try to find an abstract of it, as for example at the beginning of the journal issue in which an article appears, or in a journal of abstracts (like Historical Abstracts) or in a book review. Fortunately, the citation indexes also cite book reviews. So you needn't just look for reviews during the several years after publication in sources like Book Review Index or Book Review Digest, which are old-fashioned, non-data-base ways to get abstracts of a book. Many older books didn't get into these two sources because until recently they didn't include reviews from many scholarly journals. They mostly abstracted reviews from popular and semi-popular periodicals.

Unfortunately, the citation indexes haven't been extended very far back. The Social Science Citation Index only goes back to the 1960s. For books published earlier than that you'll have to fall back on Book Review Digest and Book Review Index, and hope for the best. Or, you can hope that Charles Hucker or some other critical bibliographer annotated the item of interest to you. Historical Abstracts’ coverage of East Asia is somewhat spotty, but it is worth checking, especially for modern history.

There are several other less complete critical bibliographies from which you can quote annotations. For example, the American Historical Association has put out a series of works under the title Guide To Historical Literature. Luckily, a new edition appeared in 1995. The most recent one before that dates to the late '60s. These AHA guides always have a well-annotated section on Asian historical literature.

Choice magazine, a journal which reviews new books for college libraries, every twenty years or so puts out a compendium, Books For College Libraries, based upon books it has reviewed. It doesn't contain annotations, but for each item gives a reference to the particular issue of Choice magazine that contains a short (175-190 word) review of the book. The latest edition came out in 1988, and a copy is in the back-room section of Wilson Library. The instructor has page proofs of the Asia section (which he helped write) which you may consult when on campus.

You may also find some comments about particular works in the short biographical dictionary articles which cited them.