Gregory James Smits (born 1960) is an American historian, academic, writer and Japanologist. He is a professor of Japanese history at Pennsylvania State University. [1]
Smits was born in Columbia, Missouri. He earned a BA from the University of Florida in 1983. He was awarded a master's degree from the University of Hawaii at Manoa. The University of Southern California granted his Ph.D. [1]
Smit's published writings encompass 8 works in 18 publications in 2 languages and 1,101 library holdings. [2]
Niccolò di Bernardo dei Machiavelli was a Florentine diplomat, author, philosopher, and historian who lived during the Italian Renaissance. He is best known for his political treatise The Prince, written around 1513 but not published until 1532, five years after his death. He has often been called the father of modern political philosophy and political science.
A nation is a type of social organization where a collective identity, a national identity, has emerged from a combination of shared features across a given population, such as language, history, ethnicity, culture, territory or society. Some nations are constructed around ethnicity while others are bound by political constitutions.
Economic history is the study of history using methodological tools from economics or with a special attention to economic phenomena. Research is conducted using a combination of historical methods, statistical methods and the application of economic theory to historical situations and institutions. The field can encompass a wide variety of topics, including equality, finance, technology, labour, and business. It emphasizes historicizing the economy itself, analyzing it as a dynamic entity and attempting to provide insights into the way it is structured and conceived.
Manchuria is a term that refers to a region in northeast Asia encompassing the entirety of present-day northeast China, and historically parts of the modern-day Russian Far East, often referred to as Outer Manchuria. Its definition may refer to varying geographical extents as follows: in the narrow sense, the area constituted by three Chinese provinces of Heilongjiang, Jilin, and Liaoning but broadly also including the eastern Inner Mongolian prefectures of Hulunbuir, Hinggan, Tongliao, and Chifeng, collectively known as Northeast China; in a broader sense, the area of historical Manchuria includes the aforementioned regions plus the Amur river basin, parts of which were ceded to the Russian Empire by the Manchu-led Qing dynasty during the Amur Annexation of 1858–1860. The parts of Manchuria ceded to Russia are collectively known as Outer Manchuria or Russian Manchuria, which include present-day Amur Oblast, Primorsky Krai, the Jewish Autonomous Oblast, the southern part of Khabarovsk Krai, and the eastern edge of Zabaykalsky Krai.
Chris Matthew Sciabarra is an American political theorist born and based in Brooklyn, New York. He is the author of three scholarly books—Marx, Hayek, and Utopia; Ayn Rand: The Russian Radical; and Total Freedom: Toward a Dialectical Libertarianism—as well as several shorter works. He is also the co-editor, with Mimi Reisel Gladstein, of Feminist Interpretations of Ayn Rand and co-editor with Roger E. Bissell and Edward W. Younkins of The Dialectics of Liberty: Exploring the Context of Human Freedom. His work has focused on topics including Objectivism, libertarianism, and dialectics.
Shō Hashi was a king of Chūzan, one of three tributary states to China on the western Pacific island of Okinawa. He is traditionally described as the unifier of Okinawa and the founder of the Ryukyu Kingdom. He was the son of the lord Shishō of the First Shō dynasty. Modern scholarship has connected Shishō's potential father, Samekawa, to a family of Southern Court-affiliated seafarers from the island of Kyushu, where Hashi was possibly born. Hashi became the lord of Sashiki Castle in southern Okinawa in 1392, becoming a noted military leader. In 1407, following a diplomatic incident between the Chūzan king Bunei and the Ming dynasty court, Shishō took the throne, attributed by the Ryukyuan official histories to a coup d'état by Hashi to install his father as king.
Shō Gen was king of the Ryukyu Kingdom from 1556 to 1572. He was called "Gen, the mute." The king required considerable support from the Sanshikan, the chief council of royal advisors. His reign marked the beginning of the council's demonstration of significantly greater effectiveness and efficiency than previously.
Shō Nei was king of the Ryukyu Kingdom from 1589 to 1620. He reigned during the 1609 invasion of Ryukyu and was the first king of Ryukyu to be a vassal to the Shimazu clan of Satsuma, a Japanese feudal domain.
Shō Sei was king of the Ryukyu Kingdom from 1526 to 1555. He was the fifth son of King Shō Shin, who he succeeded.
John Whitney Hall was an American historian of Japan who specialized in premodern Japanese history. His life work was recognized by the Japanese government, which awarded him the Order of the Sacred Treasure.
Over the course of Japan's Edo period, the Ryūkyū Kingdom sent eighteen missions to Edo, the capital of Tokugawa Japan. The unique pattern of these diplomatic exchanges evolved from models established by the Chinese, but without denoting any predetermined relationship to China or to the Chinese world order. The Kingdom became a vassal to the Japanese feudal domain (han) of Satsuma following Satsuma's 1609 invasion of Ryūkyū, and as such were expected to pay tribute to the shogunate; the missions also served as a great source of prestige for Satsuma, the only han to claim any foreign polity, let alone a kingdom, as its vassal.
Tsūkō ichiran (通航一覧) is a mid-19th century Japanese compilation of documents or "survey of intercourse" related to the foreign relations of the Tokugawas and the Tokugawa shogunate.
Shō Shitsu was a king of the Ryukyu Kingdom who held the throne from 1648 until his death in 1668.
Shō Tei was the 11th King of the Second Shō Dynasty of the Ryukyu Kingdom, who held the throne from 1669 until his death in 1709. He was the ruler of Ryukyu at the time of the compiling of the Chūzan Seifu.
The John Whitney Hall Book Prize has been awarded annually since 1994 by the Association for Asian Studies (AAS). Pioneer Japanese studies scholar John Whitney Hall is commemorated in the name of this prize.
Turtleback or Turtle-back tombs or turtle shell tombs are a particular type of tombs originating from the Song Dynasty. They are commonly found in some coastal provinces of southern China, the Ryukyu Islands of Japan, and in Vietnam. They can also be found in countries with overseas Chinese populations like Malaysia.
Shō Toku was the son of Shō Taikyū and last king of the First Shō Dynasty. He came to power as a young man in a kingdom whose treasury had been depleted. He engaged in efforts to conquer islands between Ryukyu and Japan and took the Mitsudomoe, the symbol of Hachiman, as his banner to emphasize his martial spirit. In 1466, he led an invasion on Kikai Island, which strained the Ryukyuan treasury with little benefit. He either died young or was possibly killed by forces within the kingdom as details are somewhat unclear. As is common for rulers who preside over the end of a dynasty, moralists portrayed him as cruel, violent, and lacking in virtue.
Shō Sen'i was the second ruler of the Second Shō dynasty of the kingdom of Ryukyu, based on the western Pacific island of Okinawa. He briefly ruled for six months in 1477, succeeding his elder brother Shō En. The official histories of the Ryukyu Kingdom state that Sen'i and his brother were the son of Shō Shoku and were born on the small island of Izena, and that Sen'i left his parents at age five to live under the care of his brother. En made Sen'i the lord of Goeku, likely as a signal that he was his expected heir to the throne.
Conrad Davis Totman is an American environmental historian, Japanologist, and translator. Totman was a Professor Emeritus at Yale University.
The bibliography covers the main scholarly books, and a few articles, dealing with the History of Japan