I have finished my first semester in the history department. I am not super satisfied with my progress, but most importantly, I survived. I tend to forget the fact that I am a wandering foreigner in the American system. I should not stress myself out with high expectations when others think I am doing fine.
It might be interesting to write down my feelings about this transition mode for future reference. I find both fascination and fear in the new field. History is a broad and free academic field. I am luckily surrounded by professors and fellow students who appreciate and encourage new ideas and big questions. ‘Uniqueness’ of historical incidents does not come from the peculiarity of the nature of incidents, but from a complicated conjuncture of the many historical threads behind them. In other words, events and people are not interesting because they stand out from their historical context, but because they are embedded within multi-layered historical contexts. This is a banal point for history students, but one thing I learned as a newcomer.
At the same time, history requires good creative/journalistic writing style. I have learned the way political scientists write over the course of the last 6 years or so. I think I can succinctly express my analyses and arguments in the way a political scientist would expect. Now I need to gain the ability to most effectively tell stories and maintain attention of the general reader. I am feeling the limit of writing interesting stories in an interesting way in English as a foreigner. We will see how much writing I can learn during my training here.
I am in the International and Global History (IGH) program since I am doing transnational history of Korea-Taiwan-Japan in the first half of twentieth century. I keep asking and am being asked the same question that I had before applying to the program: “What is international/global history?” Scholars take different approaches based on their own beliefs on what (international/global) history should be like. Personally, I like the idea of “all historians do international/global history with or without intending to do so” rather than considering it as a new form of diplomatic history. I am against framing it as history of “the international arena” of some sort. It reminds me of Kenneth Waltz’s old thesis, which I blame for preventing interesting studies that fall right between IR and comparative politics in the current field of political science. I rather prefer writings (on anything) with a global perspective; e.g. history of a small village that tells the global context. Bold comparative histories are also thought provoking. Comparative history has less problems in dealing with the inter-relatedness among cases than comparative politics, which treat cases as independent samples in principle.
I also found a potential dissertation topic this semester: The youth groups (or youth corps) mobilized under Japanese imperialism. I took advantage of an opportunity to write a historiographical paper on an international/global historical issue, and compared literatures on the Japanese youth groups (Seinendan), the Hitler Jugend, and the British Boy Scouts. It was really hard to synthesize them all, but I learned a lot about the issues thanks to this practice exercise. I will hopefully make rough notes on the readings I did in this blog over my Christmas break.