Information skills for Historians

A quick reminder that there will be sessions looking at information resources for historians in Room E17 (Library) on

• Friday 4th November (10-11 a.m.)
• Friday 11th November (10-11 a.m.)

The sessions will look at topics such as electronic journals, databases (full-text and bibliographic), the Library's online subject guides, and looking for resources beyond SOAS

Please email ms28@soas.ac.uk and let me know if you would like to attend either of these sessions.

Imperial heights : book review

Eric Jenning's Imperial heights: Dalat and the making and undoing of French Indochina looks at the development of Dalat, some 100 miles northeast of the modern Ho-Chi Minh City on the Lang Bian Plateau, as a hill-station and spa for European colonialists in the early 20th century. By the 1920s, it was a "decidedly French social space".

Read the review by Michael Vann in the Institute of Historical Research's Reviews in History and see the author's response to the review as well.

Find the book in SOAS Library at GG959.703 / 742279.
Link to the Library Catalogue from  here

Professor Eric Jennings  is based at the Department of History, University of Toronto
Associate Professor Michael Vann is based at the Department of History, California State University, Sacremento.

Women and trade-unionism in post-war Japan: book review

Dr. Christopher Gerteis' book Gender struggles: wage-earning women and male-dominated unions in post-war Japan was published by Harvard University Asia Center in 2009 as one of their East Asian Monographs series

Read the latest review (in Journal of Japanese Studies, Vol.37(2) 2011)

Dr Gerteis lectures on the history of contemporary Japan here at SOAS
The reviewer, Professor Robin LeBlanc, lectures on politics and law at the Washington and Lee University School of Law, Lexington (Virginia)

There are two copies available in SOAS Library at D331.478 / 987419.
 Link to the catalogue entry from HERE

Storytelling and oral history

A report from the BBC's Middle East website looks at the tradition of storytelling and the role of the professional storyteller  in the Middle East, and how history (ancient and modern) as well as contemporary events such as the Arab Spring are being adapted by the storytellers.

Click HERE to read the report

The report also includes videos of modern professional storytellers performing
But will the traditional art survive in competition with modern technology?

Welcome to SOAS

Follow the History blog for updates on SOAS Library resources, book reviews, websites, news-stories and much more

You can go to the Information skills pages on the BLE for general research guides, guides to the various databases and subject specific research guides

You can also use the Subject Guide for History on the main Library website for internet resources selected by Library staff : http://www.soas.ac.uk/library/subjects/history/

If you have any queries about the history collections in SOAS Library, finding books and journals, or using any of the online resources, you can contact me:

Mary Seeley (Subject Librarian for History and Religions; Ancient Near East, Semitics and Judaica)
Room C3 (Library)
Email: ms28@soas.ac.uk
Tel.: 020-7898-4195

Russian Orientalism: 2 new studies

Read Rachel Polonsky's article "The paradoxes of Russian Orientalism" from the online Times Literary Supplement which examines the Russian view of "the East" and outlines the connections between the nomads of the Asian steppes and the European Slavs.
The article looks at how these issues are explored in two recent books - David Schimelpenninck van der Oye's Russian Orientalism: Asia in the Russian mind from Peter the Great to the emigration (2010) - in SOAS Library at A303.48247 / 733376 - and Vera Tolz's Russia's own Orient: the politics of identity and Oriental studies in the late imperial and early Soviet periods (2011) - on order

Gertrude Bell and Iraq

This article from the Jerusalem Post looks at the life and legacy of Gertrude Bell (1868-1926) both as an adventurer and explorer, as well her role as a "political officer" in Basra in 1916 and involvement in the creation of the modern Iraqi state in 1920