HIST 284 - Visions of Japan’s Empire in East Asia: 19th-Century Origins through World War II

FDR: HU
Credits: 3
Planned Offering: Fall 2014 and alternate years.

Japan’s 19th-century imperial system ensured its status as the only major non-western “great power” in the first half of the 20th century. Within the space of its fifty years of existence (1895-1945), imperial Japan underwent radical political, social and cultural transformations that had equally profound effects on East Asian and world history, culminating in World War II. The course explores these distinctive transformations, which constitute Japan’s theory and practice of political and cultural imperialism, through an analysis of text and image, from which the class constructs a website. Bello.