🧵1/3 Exciting (for me) progress for this Friday's MHHK update. We've begun to experiment with integrating the Carl Smith Index Card collection for HK history. My colleague Eric Chow has been tokenizing the cards and appending GPS coordinates to recorded locations using the Google Maps API.

We are recruiting a Postdoc Research Associate (Oral History) at the Hong Kong History Centre at Bristol! Please feel free to circulate to any friends and colleagues, and/or get in touch if you're interested.

Wasn't totally satisfied with last week's map transformations, so I've been playing around with Thin Plate Spline transformations on the larger maps this week using the same reference points. Instantly better look, with much more accurate coastlines for Hong Kong and Kowloon.

Applications are open for the MITACS Globalink Research Internship, and we're looking for two undergraduate students to participate in the MHHK project next summer at UPEI. Internships are fully funded. Deadline closes 17 September. Project ID is 49248 www.mitacs.ca/our-programs...

Spent bits of the last week correcting new maps pulled from the HKPRO. Some truly interesting ones of the development of The Peak and Cheung Chau. I've pulled a series that I'm excited about as well that surveys Kowloon, NT, and Sai Wan village lots (still to be processed).

Academic hack: if I split my time between PEI in the winter and HK in the summer, I can gain almost another month of forced vacation on account of weather.

This week's MHHK update. Stonecutter's Island, reclamation projects, and the villages to the west of Kowloon (1964). Not sure how accurate the source map was on rural lots and buildings, so will have to check these against the far more detailed large-scale surveys from the following decades.

Today’s best archival find is Caleb Cushing trying to figure out a suitable Chinese name. He eventually settled on 顧聖, but I think 鼓聲 (drumbeat) should have stuck. Would have looked better on the Treaty of Wangxia and the dozens of red calling cards he had written up.

Discounts, friends!

publication day. the history of racial violence against immigrants in the early 20th c. remains as important to history as it does to our present academic.oup.com/jah/article/... With many thanks to those who supported me on this journey.

This is a fantastic article and such an important project! It sets a high bar for how colonial heritage projects and co-creation should be conducted. MBC also rejects extractive research practices through its efforts to bring research back to the community. Congrats on the pub @brebisz.bsky.social!

Archives imitate life. “I am still in Washington and for most of the time we are sweltering in tropical heat”

Love visiting a country where the museums have signs reminding you that you can’t bring your gun along.

This week's MHHK. So many lots to fill. Is the task hypnotic? Yes. Is it therapeutic? No. Have I watched two HBO miniseries while doing it? Absolutely.

While I don't fully agree with the periodization (there are parts of the last 5 months that feel more at home in the Smoot-Hawley era), Immerwahr draws some important comparisons - and also helps us think through the puzzle of Trump's awkward historical self-comparisons. Now someone do Lincoln.

Congratulations to Bristol PhD student, Jenny Hutton, on her recent NLM blog posting about her historical research. @uobartsmatter.bsky.social @uobrishistory.bsky.social Medically Manufactured: The Story of Retrolental Fibroplasia circulatingnow.nlm.nih.gov/2025/06/12/m...

Minnesota police urge protestors not to attend the ‘No Kings’ demonstration out of an ‘abundance of caution’. The far right proves that an abundance of violence will be used to silence dissent.

Today's MHHK work has really been more this week's MHHK work - to the detriment of the article I was supposed to be writing. Got sucked into building a road layer on this 1964 map of Kowloon. While it took forever, working backwards from this map should just be a process of subtraction.

Added MHHK's first georeferenced base map for Kowloon today. Likely going to have to redo it though because I forgot to correct Stonecutters Island. Eventually the project will include the entire territory, but I can't say I'm looking forward to how long some of those maps are going to take.

As with last year’s fires, it amazes me that international coverage of an environmental crisis affecting most of Canada is framed through its impact on the U.S.

***Digital History Seed Grants*** The IEHS invites submissions for awards, up to $2,000 each, to support graduate students and early-career scholars seeking to develop or engage with digital history work connected to migration history and related fields. Deadline: 8/1/25 iehs.org/awards/seed_...

That this event exists - in P.E.I no less - tells a concerning story about our simmering, historic, and often reactionary paranoia of China - a nation that, in contrast to the expansionist rhetoric of the U.S., is constantly upheld as a foil by the Right as the 'real' existential threat to Canada.

New cover reveal! Forging Fraternity in Late Medieval Society: The Palmers' Guild of Ludlow by Rachael Harkes @latemedievalist.bsky.social Part of our #OpenAccess New Historical Perspectives series, publishing in Nov uolpress.co.uk/book/forging... @ihr.bsky.social @royalhistsoc.org #Skystorians

Spent the last month wrapping up term and moving so I haven't found time to update about MHHK progress, but I've spent this afternoon tracking down source maps and wanted to share this 1958 one from the Hai Kwang Press. By far one of my favourites.

Still working on 1842 this week for the MHHK project. So instead I wanted to showcase one of my current favourite markers of shoreline change in Hong Kong: Kellett Island (photo courtesy of the @uobrishistory.bsky.social Historical Photographs of China project).

Two more (open access) articles published First View w/ Itinerario from our forthcoming volume on race, culture, identity, and imperial belonging! Catherine Ladds's "Managing White Criminality" is a brilliant examination of delinquency, extrality, and colonial mores along the China coast.

This week's work with MHHK included finishing up the map of the 1920s and starting a new one on the 1840s as I continue to build out the starter kit. This has meant working with Adolphe Dubois de Jancigny's fantastic 1842 survey, which provides a very different profile of Hong Kong's shoreline.

"Based on the lack of respect that China has shown the World's markets"... What an absolute clown show.

What a difference 20 years makes. Much of today's work with MHHK has been spent splitting lots in Hong Kong. The examples are from 1866 (first image) and 1886 (second). If the Land Registry website is anything to go by, this is going to quickly become tedious.

In today’s post June Chow looks at Chinese Canadian immigration through archives, community memory, and the right to remember.

In the midst of marking, so not much done with MHHK this week. So I thought I'd share one of my favourite parts of working on this series - the visualization of Hong Kong's land reclamation.

First view of my article has just been published open access with Itinerario for our forthcoming special issue on race, identity, and imperial belonging in East Asian port cities. Keep an eye out for articles as well by Catherine Ladds, Catherine Chan, and Bernard Keo!

Did y'all know that what we've been doing for our whole careers is "factually baseless"? Thankfully J.D. is on the case to show us the error of our ways. Wouldn't want professionals to get in the way of a good time. How long until you think the struggle sessions begin?

In an effort to remind myself that there's more to life than panic-refreshing the news, I'm going to start posting weekly Friday updates on the Mapping Historical Hong Kong Project as we work to create c.156 interactive maps of Hong Kong throughout history.

The ppl who decried the removal of confederate monuments and base renaming are the same ones purging. It was never about the history, which can’t be erased, it’s about the narrative - glorify the white supremacists and hide the people who challenged them 🗃️🗺️🍎 #milhist wapo.st/4bzcQPe (Gift article)

A seminar activities in my US survey is to design a public history campaign to explore the legacy and memory of America's global involvement in WWII. At least one group of students has ALWAYS chosen to amplify the Navajo Code Talkers. Second year history students get it. So why can't the US Gov?

The boom Jeff notes is a welcome one. I distinctly recall being steered away from Hong Kong during my masters. It has been encouraging to see recent works on the city (and territory, more broadly) gain so much traction!

This is a whack week to be teaching the roots of the Civil Rights Movement

REF management urged to acknowledge realities of the sector’s current crisis and maintain portability of outputs to avoid further damage to humanities research careers @englishassociation.bsky.social @ies-sas.bsky.social @univeng.bsky.social

HKHC Speaker's Series, Dr. Kwong Chi Man 𝐒𝐩𝐚𝐭𝐢𝐚𝐥 𝐇𝐢𝐬𝐭𝐨𝐫𝐲 𝐚𝐬 𝐌𝐞𝐭𝐡𝐨𝐝: 𝐔𝐬𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐉𝐚𝐩𝐚𝐧𝐞𝐬𝐞 𝐎𝐜𝐜𝐮𝐩𝐚𝐭𝐢𝐨𝐧 𝐨𝐟 𝐇𝐨𝐧𝐠 𝐊𝐨𝐧𝐠 𝐚𝐬 𝐄𝐱𝐚𝐦𝐩𝐥𝐞, 𝟏𝟗𝟒𝟏-𝟏𝟗𝟒𝟓 1 Apr 2025, 3:30 – 5pm (UKT) Register: tktp.as/ESNOUC

If only historians familiar with the 1920s/30s had warned that this might (definitely) happen…

One of my favourite parts of academia that will never cease to be surreal. As an undergrad writing on republican China, I relied heavily on Henriot’s Virtual Shanghai platform, and now, this evening, I’ve just received in the mail his new edited volume which I had the privilege of contributing to.

Shame on CBC for even entertaining this ‘conversation’. There’s no ‘conversation’ to be had around American expansionism, whatever the purpose of ‘51st state rhetoric’ might be. Such rhetoric needs to be condemned, not given room to breathe.

💥 Great to see the research of Dr Beth Rebisz (@uobrishistory.bsky.social), Dr Richard Cole (@clahbristol.bsky.social), Prof Ed King & Dr Paul Merchant (HiPLA) feature in the latest Research Frontiers newsletter Read the issue to find out more about our research 👇 bristol.ac.uk/research/imp...

A nice surprise to wake up today to the news that Modern China in Flux is out online ahead of print, and that it's been made open access! Modern China in Flux collects essays that explore Chinese society through the underlying framework of network analysis, leveraging digital methods to do so.

The Miscellaneous Collection contains a large variety of photographs, from the aerial maps of Chinese cities to exercising with dumbbells. If you'd like to find out more, see: hpcbristol.net/collections/... (Bh-d03; Bi-s126) #Chinesehistory #Chinaphotos #historyphotographed

New post up on the Columbia University Press Blog describing the slow burn of Chinese-American relations since 1784. Check out the link below for grandiose claims about why historically contextualising this relationship matters!

This is now out today with a chapter by yours truly, as well as fellow @hongkonghistory.bsky.social alumni Catherine Chan and Katon Lee. Grateful for the opportunity Catherine and Ben provided to think critically about how/why archives are created and what historians can (and can't) do with them.

New office, new school, same deep aversion to the cold. Currently sourcing barges to tow Prince Edward Island to the Caribbean.