An "Other" Historian's Diary

My advisor's book, Culture and Liberty in the Age of the American Revolution , concludes with a line: "The history of early modern American freedom was not a story of attacks on the exclusive club of owners of liberty in order to destroy it or replace it with an entirely new one. Rather, it was a lengthy chronicle of diverse group pounding at the gates and demanding membership." Yesterday was Martin Luther King Jr. Day. I don't claim myself to be an expert in 20th century U.S. history. However, while MLK Day has diverse meanings for different people, for me, it marks an extraordinary achievement in the process of acquiring human rights. I don't believe in natural rights. I think that no right is "natural." The only way to acquire rights is fighting for them! Human history consists of a series of events within which people fought for their social, economic, and political rights. Thus, rights are actually culturally constructed after people "poun...

Years ago, looking for a PhD program that would admit me, I wrote lots of emails to the professors that I was interested to work with. I was really excited when I received words of encouragement. The most memorable one for me, among all the impressive response I got, was one from Professor J. C. D Clark at University of Kansas. I was still in Taiwan back at that time. I sent him my research proposal and asked him for suggestion. He emailed me back. (I was thrilled when I was his response: Such a prominent professor would actually answer an email from someone out of nowhere!) And he said he had been thinking that we needed someone from a non-European background to do the history of political thoughts of the American Revolution, so that we could have different perspectives. Although I ended up not getting admitted by University of Kansas, this message has been of great influence in my career, and I have been searching for what different perspective I could bring to this flourishing f...

I am a Taiwanese PhD student at Saint Louis University working on the history of the American Revolution, focusing on the political culture of New York Loyalism. Almost every time when I go to a conference, I get the same questions: "Why do you study US history?" "Why do you choose to study the American Revolution? Back when I was in Taiwan, most publications of U.S. history were translated from American books, and were about WWII and other more contemporary themes, probably because these topics were hot, and were more relevant to our current world. There were some books about the Revolution, the Constitution, and Civil War, but most of them were not very scholarly. When I was in college, we had one U.S. history professor in our department, just like there might be some Chinese or eastern history professor in history departments in U.S. Her research interest was mainly on Taiwan-American diplomatic relation, and later shifted to how American popular culture influenc...