“I wasn’t trying to put any sort of revisionist stamp on anything because I saw myself as a chronicler and storyteller (heck, it’s an interesting story and deserves to be told well), not as an academic trying to come up with some new interpretation.”Ībout the warrior monks, I’ll just say this: If I had written a dissertation on them, I bet I would have concluded that they had played a bigger role too.
In other words, its purpose is to “tell the story,” not to advance any particular core thesis.” “The book, you’ll note, is narrative history, not a dissertation. I mean, once you become the foremost expert on Cholla rice production in the 1590s as it relates to the war, no one is going to be able to criticize your work, right? “The Impact of the Imjin War on Rice Production in Cholla Province”), then spend the rest of their careers protecting this little quarter-acre of ground. Academics tend to choose very narrow topics to specialize in (i.e. So why didn’t some history professor with much better language skills than me write a book on the Imjin War first? The reason, I think, is that the topic is too big, too wide-ranging for an academic to tackle. It’s because I really like Hawley’s attitude and approach to history, as revealed in some excellent quotes: If I’m not interested in the Imjin War, why would I bother posting about this interview? I must admit that I’ve never been too interested in the Imjin War, for whatever reasons, but from what I gather from the interview, it sounds like the general consensus on the Samurai-Archives Forum is that Hawley’s book is the best one out there right now in English, and is also one of the first. In the meantime, though, the Shogun-ki blog, the official blog of the Samurai Archives Japanese History Page, has posted an excellent interview with amateur historian Samuel Hawley, author of The Imjin War, a thick 664 page book on Hideyoshi’s invasions of Korea in the 1590s.
I guess my blog has in recent weeks become nothing but reposts… I promise, soon, I’ll find the time to post my own fully formed posts again.
0 kommentar(er)
