Fabric Cheat Sheet from the 19th century Qing Dynasty that displays calligraphy a candidate would have been required to know for a civil service exam. It can currently be found in the C.V. Starr East Asian Library at Columbia University in New York, New York.

Bibliography

Burbank, Jane, and Frederick Cooper. Empires in World History. Princeton UP, 2010. Print.

“Jewels In Her Crown: Treasures of Columbia University Libraries Special Collections.” East Asian Collections. Columbia University Libraries,2004. Web. http://www.columbia.edu/cu/lweb/eresources/exhibitions/treasures/html/long_topic2.html

“Section 2. Cranes and Peacocks: Rank Badges for Civil Officials.” Ran and Style: Power Dressing in Imperial China. The Pacific Asia Museum, Pasadena, CA, 2008. Web. http://www.pacificasiamuseum.org/rankandstyle/html/pdf/RankandStyle_Section_2.pdf

“The Chinese Imperial Examination System.” Confucianism and the Chinese Scholastic System. Web. <https://www.cpp.edu/~plin/ls201/confucian3.html>.

Vongsathorn, Kathleen. History of the Modern World. Lafayette College. Pennsylvania. 02 March 2015. Lecture.

Young, Chris. Lonely Eyes. 2014. MP3

Horses Don’t Fly

I found my book by searching key words ‘World War I’ in the Lafayette Library catalog online. One of the first books that popped up was a diary of a World War I soldier so I wrote down the call number and went to that section to look. The section was full of World War I novels, memoirs, and diaries. I did not even find the book I planned on getting because I found this one first; Horses Don’t Fly, a Word War I memoir by Frederick Libby. This book caught my eye at first glance because it was huge and because the title was really unusual. I read the short summary on the back and immediately knew I wanted to write about this book. In class we had talked a little bit about the introduction of new warfare during World War I like chemical warfare and airplanes. This memoir tells the story of Frederick Libby who was “the first pilot to fly the American colors over enemy lines” during World War I (Libby). Although, before joining the US army Libby was part of the Canadian army. The memoir is broken into thirty chapters describing the first twenty-six years of Libby’s life. It talks about his early years as a cowboy in the Old West and then goes on to explain his reasons for joining the war and the experiences and memories of being a pilot during World War I, and finally, his life after returning home from the war. Overall, I believe this book would be a great addition to our current material on World War I and I actually plan on reading it on my own.

Libby, Frederick. Horses Don’t Fly. 2000. Memoir. Print.

Lauren Hughes

16 February 2015

Indian Ocean Slavery in the Age of Abolition

Harms, Robert, Bernard Freamon, and David Blight, eds. Indian Ocean Slavery in the Age of Abolition. New Haven: Yale UP, 2013. Print.

I started out finding this book by talking with the lady at the reference desk in the front of the library. We looked up key words Africa*, Slave*, and Trade on the library catalogue to find the area in the library where books about slave trade would be. The asterisks were important because the results included words in the titles similar to the key word typed in. For example, searching Africa* would pick up key words such as African as well. Most of the hits came up in the HT 1300’s section upstairs. I explored that section and looked at two other books before I found this one. All the books in that section had the word slavery in the title, but this book caught my eye because in class we have been talking about maritime empires and slave trade across the Atlantic and Indian oceans and this book had the words Indian, Ocean, and Slavery all in the title. I chose this book because although we have talked about slave trade in the Indian Ocean, we haven’t discussed slave trade across the Indian Ocean when it was illegal. I thought it would be really interesting to learn more about the difficulty or easiness of slave trade across the Indian Ocean when it was an abolished practice. According to the excerpt on the back, the book is about the increase in illegal slave trade in the western Indian Ocean during the 1800’s and 1900’s after Great Britain declared slavery illegal in the transatlantic world (Harms, Freamon & Blight). Britain’s act caused an increase in slave trade across the Indian Ocean because Great Britain began patrolling the Atlantic coast of Africa, so slave traders had to round the Cape of Good Hope and enter the Indian Ocean to acquire slaves (Harms, Freamon & Blight 1). The book also includes stories about the lives of real slaves who endured this journey. Overall, I think this book would be a great addition to our current material about maritime empires and slave trade across the world.