Chapter II-2 - Edward S. Morse grows up

In which teenage Edward S. Morse of Salem, Massachusetts, begins a life-long love affair with shells, leaves home for Boston, studies with Louis Agassiz at the Museum of Comparative Zoology in Cambridge, and becomes the world's leading authority on brachiopods (by proving conclusively that these tiny creatures are not mollusks, but worms), and how these same brachiopods lead him, at the age of thirty-nine, to Japan

Learning from those "imitative" Japanese : Edward S. Morse and the civilization of the Mikado's empire

Already in the twelfth century, men canvassed different views on the ways in which they thought lordship ought to be exercised. They used their picture of how an idealised "Good Lord" -- a familiar label in later times -- comported himself to assess the treatment they actually received from their lords. This Good Lordship had both Positive and Negative aspects: the "good lord" maintained his vassals in their honours and renounced his right to revoke grants afterwards. One excellent way to study the pursuit of this double ideal is through the language of charters, more particularly through the warranty clauses by which Good Lordship was often implemented. The transformation of warranty into its familiar Common-Law shape reflects corresponding and complex changes in both lord-vassal relations and the role of the King and his justice. Warranty actually began as a security device, designed to keep men to their word, and is found used in this sense over wide areas of sub- Carolingian Europe. It was probably imported to England by the French, and can be seen in twelfth-century charters progressively superseding other forms of words to become the classic "guarantee" of Good Lordship. In this manner it came by 1200 to be virtually equated with the lordship it had originally been used to enforce. Warranty was lordship seen from the vassal's point of view, that is, tenant-right. Despite this origin in very personal relations, warranty probably always created between the parties' heirs some kind of obligation, which sharpened and was made infinitely more clear-cut with the emergence of full legal inheritance rights. Warranty swelled to full tenant-right, a full guarantee of the Right to Good Lordship. As the heir's claim grew into an enforceable right of inheritance through increasing access to remedies by royal justice, and because such justice tended to strict construction, warranty became a contractual addition to which claimants had to prove their entitlement. The narrative of legal change from 1150 argues for gradual evolution but also suggests 1153-4 as the decisive turning-point in this development. Detailed (sometimes technical) examination of evidence for some relevant cases, royal writs concerning warranty and the turning-point of 1153-4 is reserved for three appendixes

Chapter IV-1 - Griffis in Tokyo

In which William E. Griffis spends more than two years in Tokyo, teaching science, promoting Christian activities, and writing on Japan for American publications, and how his sister Maggie comes to live with him, and how during those two years he keeps longing for the traditional Japan that he is helping to destroy, the Japan he so precipitously fled from in Fukui

Chapter I - Landing in Japan

In which our three heroes -- William E. Griffis, missionary; Edward S. Morse, scientist; and Lafcadio Hearn, writer -- find during their first weeks in Japan that this Asian country lives up to some of their preconceptions, violates others, and altogether proves to be a more complicated, perplexing, challenging, and interesting place than they had imagined

History in images / history in words : reflections on the possibility of really putting history on film (or what a historian begins to think about when people start turning his books into movies)

This was supposed to be easy. A chance to bring together all my thoughts on film and history. To make my inchoate notions coherent. To force myself to see what it is I have been thinking. But it has not been easy--more like attempting to pick up water and hold it in your hand. The ideas will not cohere. They change between the thinking and the writing of them. They slip away. They refuse to blend into a whole. Is it me? Is it the subject? I won't even bother with that one. The point is to say only what I can. Which means refusing to make artificial sense of ideas that will not make sense. Which means refusing to bridge the gaps in my knowledge. Which means refusing to make connections where connections do not yet (in my mind) exist. Which means abandoning the idea of an essay and doing no more than sharing some of my reflections and the ideas I have wrestled with during the months I have been attempting to write this piece. Which means there will be no linear development, no attempt at closure, no final answers to the questions posed by the elusive problem of can we represent history on film

Morse at Enoshima and Tokyo

In which our hero sets up a marine laboratory at Enoshima in the summer of 1877 and then, in the fall, takes up his position as first professor of Zoology at the Imperial University in Tokyo. And how he excavates the kitchen middens at Omori and introduces archeology to Japan; and how he brings his family to live there for two years; and how he begins to collect pottery; and how he learns how to waste (enjoy?) time; and how he leaves in 1879 with many interests and ideas that were not his just three years before

Chapter II-1- William E. Griffis grows up

In which William E. Griffis is born in Philadelphia, grows to young manhood, becomes a twice-born Christian, serves briefly in the Civil War, attends Rutgers College, plays football, travels to Europe, begins theological seminary, gets engaged and, when the engagement is broken, jumps at the opportunity of becoming (for a handsome salary) a chemistry teacher (and crypto-missionary) in feudal Japan

Hearn from Leucadia to Martinique

The heart-rending story of an orphan with parents, and the many crooked and cruel twists of fate he suffers in the first forty years of life as he goes from a privileged childhood to a poverty-stricken manhood. From Greece, the story moves to Ireland, France and England, thence to Cincinnati where our hero becomes a sensationalist newspaperman and marries a black woman; thence to New Orleans for a decade of literary editing and finally to Martinique, that promised tropical land, where he finds it much easier to make love than work