FootNotes

Discussion of the United States’ relations with China, Taiwan, and Hong Kong can be framed as an issue of nationalism and national humiliation. Taiwan and Hong Kong are and have been crucial symbols of China’s emergence as a strong...

Abstract: When individuals and populations of organisms face resource scarcity, they respond in various ways: by substituting other resources, by expanding or changing geographic range, or by finding ways to compete more successfully for the resources. Humans have also...

Pennsylvania’s President James Buchanan rode to the White House on the strength of an unprecedented economic boom. Since 1846, U.S. markets had been boosted by Britain’s embrace of free trade, the Mexican War, the California Gold Rush, railroad and...

China’s Early Encounters with the West: A history in reverse Andrew Wilson of the U.S. Naval War College explained how the image of a weak backward China adrift in a modern world, bullied by Western powers, dominates China’s historical...

I am going to look at the history of China’s encounters with the West in reverse order, beginning with the more familiar storyline of China as a weak and battered power in the modern era and closing with a...

I want to talk about rising China and the United States. To start with a couple obvious points about the rise of Chinese power in the twenty-first century, the most obvious is that we are talking about a resurrection...

By their very nature, diplomacy and military force are means to the ends of statecraft as well as channels by which governments press their agendas onto others. Neither is inherently more or less useful than the other. Diplomacy verbally...

No detached observer of 1450 would have picked Western Europe as the most likely group to break out from their isolation and become dominant among the world’s civilizations. The Ottoman Empire, China, India, and perhaps even the Mongols all...

Our general subject is why and how to teach military history in high school; my particular assignment is to reflect on ways in which military history might be used to enable students to think more seriously about war and...