Product Description

Designed for the East Asian history course, this text features the latest scholarship on the region's cultural, political, economic, and intellectual history. Coverage is balanced among East Asian countries, with approximately 20 percent of the text focused on Korea, an area that has become increasingly important in world politics. Special attention is devoted to gender and material culture, themes are reinforced through the text's pedagogical features. Full color inserts on topics such as food, clothing, and art objects illustrate the rich artistic heritage of East Asia and bolster the coverage of material culture. Features include a range of primary source documents on topics such as women's independence and students-turned-soldiers, and biographical sketches throughout the text highlight the lives of popular figures and ordinary people. "Connections" features provide an international context for the history of East Asia, including topics such the origin and spread of Buddhism and a global perspective of World War II.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #168164 in Books
• Published on: 2008-06-20
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 528 pages

About the Author
Patricia B. Ebrey, Professor with Joint Appointment: Early Imperial China, Song Dynasty, at the University of Washington in Seattle, received her Ph.D. from Columbia University in 1975. She has published numerous journal articles and published The Cambridge Illustrated History of China (Cambridge University Press, 1996). Her monographs include The Inner Quarters: Marriage and the Lives of Chinese Women in the Sung Period (University of California Press, 1993) and Confucianism and Family Rituals in Imperial China: A Social History of Writing about Rites (Princeton University Press, 1991). She is a co-author of East Asia: A Cultural, Social, and Political History and author of China: A Cultural, Social, and Political History (both Houghton Mifflin, 2006).

Customer Reviews

Great coverage of all of northeast Asia
I don't understand why some reviews were not so good. I thought this book did an excellent job of covering the history of East Asia (mostly Korea, China, and Japan). There are some good photos here too and I liked how there was some analysis on the relations of the countries and not just bland statements or repetitions of other history books (ie-there's some good writing on how Japanese history was influenced by Korean and Chinese culture). The format is easy to read and does not bore you to sleep. I would have bought a hardcover copy if they had one as I liked this very much.

memorable titbits of detail
The authors take a grand sweep across half of Asia and thousands of years. They cover 3 countries - China, Japan and Korea. By virtue of geographic size and population, China receives the greatest coverage. Its long sequence of dynasties are covered in impressive detail. Not just in the political and military events of those eras. The book also devotes space to explaining the religious and philosophical changes. Notably the Analects of Confucius, Daoism, the incursion of Buddhism from India into China, which finally adopted it as its own.

There is also extensive coverage of Japanese civilisation. While derived from Chinese, it soon adopted its own unique features, including the Shinto version of Buddhism.

The book also has memorable titbits of historical detail, some of which may be stick in the reader's memory. Maybe like in medieval Japan, where landlords might segregate toilets by sex, because men's excrement was more highly valued by farmers than women's. Most history books just don't talk about this stuff!

A Well-Rounded Overview of East Asian Civilization
~East Asia: A Cultural, Social, and Political History~ is a fairly well-written overview of East Asian civilization. Broad in scope, it gives depth to cultural, economic, political and social facets of history. The book is decisively China-centric, but the preponderance of materials on China owes to its startling geographic scope and paramount role at influencing East Asian civilization. The treatments of Japan and Korea are pretty in-depth nonetheless. This book covers everything from Qin Shi Huang Di, the First Emperor of China, to the climatic Battle of Sekigahara, which inaugurated the Tokugawa Dynasty in seventeenth century Japan. Designed as a textbook for college students, all things considered, it's a worthwhile contribution to East Asian historical scholarship.