Introduction Greetings! I am currently on the road for a conference and workshop. As such, I will be sharing some papers that were presented at the Martial Arts Studies Research Network’s recent conference in Bath. If you missed the first presentation in this series, click here for the discussion of “Bartitsu and Suffragette Jujitsu…
Tag: martial arts history
Traditional Chinese Martial Arts and the “YMCA Consensus”
***I am very excited to introduce the following guest post by my friend Scott Phillips. In this essay Scott draws on his extensive study of modern Chinese religious and social history in an attempt to develop a powerful new concept for describing and theorizing the massive reforms of the Chinese martial arts…
“Now With Kung Fu Grip”: Jared Miracle and the Reinvention of the Martial Arts in America
Jared Miracle. 2016. Now with Kung Fu Grip! How Bodybuilders, Soldiers and a Hairdresser Reinvented Martial Arts for America. Jefferson, North Carolina:McFarland & Company. 185 pages. $29.95 Introduction Now with Kung Fu Grip is the scholarly yet accessible one volume history of the Asian fighting arts in America that current…
Alex Gillis Talks about Tae Kwon Do, Controversy and Researching Martial Arts History
Introduction One of the first books that I reviewed on this blog was A Killing Art: The Untold History of Tae Kwon Do by Alex Gillis. To this day it remains one of my favorite discoveries and a revised and expanded edition has just been released. With a background in investigative journalism…
Martial Arts History, Without Chronology
Your mission, should choose to accept it… Recently I have been invited to contribute chapters to a number of upcoming projects. I am still attempting to decide what some of these should be, but in two cases the editors of the volumes in question have approached me with specific requests. For…
Kung Fu Tea Selects the Top Chinese Martial Arts Webpage of 2014
Introduction Welcome to our third annual discussion of the top webpages in Chinese martial studies. The purpose of this series is to acknowledge some of the individuals who have made great contributions to our understanding of the traditional martial arts in the last year. We also hope that visitors who are…
Through a Lens Darkly (15): How Fr. Michel de Maynard Captured Chinese Martial Culture in a Moment of Transition (1906-1912).
Introduction The old adage states that a picture is worth a thousand words. After having reviewed hundreds of potential images for this series of posts, and writing over a dozen entries, I can now state with some certainty that this is not always the case. Some pictures can inspire a great deal of critical or…
Lives of Chinese Martial Artists (8): Gu Ruzhang-Northern Shaolin Master and Southward Bound Tiger.
Introduction Gu Ruzhang is one of the best known martial artists of the Republic of China era. He is remembered today as a pioneer who helped to bring Northern Shaolin to Southern China. Most accounts of his illustrious career start with his appearance at the first National Guoshu Exam held in 1928. At the conclusion…
Butterfly Swords and Boxing: Exploring a Lost Southern Chinese Martial Arts Training Manual.
The Importance of the “Foreign Language Literature” in Chinese Martial Studies It is very hard to pierce the veil of the mid-19th century and to understand what exactly was happening in the development of the popular martial arts between about 1820 and 1880. This is particularly true in areas that suffered a great deal of…
Lives of Chinese Martial Artists (4): Sun Lutang’s Unified Theory of the Chinese Martial Arts: Daoist Spirituality, Health and Boxing (Part III).
Sun Lutang and the Field of Chinese Martial Studies This post is the third and final installment of our three part review of the life and contributions of Sun Lutang. Sun was a master of Xingyi, Bagua and Taiji boxing from Hebei Province who had an important impact on the development of the Chinese Martial…
Alex Gillis Takes on a “Killing Art.”
Alex Gillis. A Killing Art: The Untold History of Tae Kwon Do. Ontario: ECW Press. 2011 (First published in 2008). 246 pages. $16.95 USD. As I mentioned here I am assembling a reading list for an undergraduate course on the Asian martial arts. My preference would be to teach it in a political science department…
