The Demons of Academia

The study of history is always a touchy subject. Many topics are deemed to boring for attention, while others are too controversial. As a requirement of my history major, I took a class on historiography, or historical theory. Basically this class addressed how historians address various "problems" in history, whether it be theories such as Marxism or feminism, or challenging topics such as the Holocaust. I will never forget reading Iris Chang's The Rape of Nanking with its horrific descriptions of the Japanese rape and pillage of the Chinese city of Nanking in 1937. To this day, it stands on my bookshelf as a reminder to how societies can agree to overlook the horrors that they inflict on one another, but how the survivors can not forget.

I miss a lot of things in life, but I don't know how I missed this last year. Six years after publishing on one of the most traumatic events in Eastern Asia, Iris Chang committed suicide. This is an interesting piece from the Times that I think does justice to her life and her life's work.