Shawn Liu Central Asia has long been imagined less as a place and more as a passage. In travelogues, school maps, and even much scholarship, it appears as a corridor—the Silk Road that carried goods and ideas between “centers” like China, Persia, or Europe. Historian Adeeb Khalid warns against this flattening: to see Central Asia only as a “road between somewhere and somewhere else” erases … Continue reading A Local History of Hong Kong
Shawn Liu The Taiping Rebellion is infamous for being one of the bloodiest civil wars in history, but it was also an ecological catastrophe. While historian John Fincher has described the conflict as a “heavily saturated topic” in historical scholarship, its ecological dimensions remain strikingly underexplored. Beyond the well-documented clashes of ideologies and armies, another form of destruction took place, one measured not in human … Continue reading Jianbi Qingye: The Environmental Warfare of the Taiping Rebellion: Walls of War, Fields of Fire
Nathan Tashjy There is nothing in the gastronomic world that is more lustful than dessert. It is the exclamation point of an evening out on the town and the self-prescribed elixir for a broken heart. Dessert is decadent, emphatic, and gratifying. The moment when sweet meets tongue is undefinable, as the world around you is completely lost. But why is this the case? What ties … Continue reading Spiced: The Historical Impact of Medieval Desserts
The Footnote 