December posting: favorite historical period

havocthecat asked me if I had a favorite historical period, so here are a few:

Meiji Japan: This is probably directly to blame for my undergraduate major in East Asian studies! And my fascination with the period is of course inspired by... Rurouni Kenshin. I think nearly everything I knew about Japanese history prior to RuroKen was all Edo period, given the whole samurai mythos and whatnot, so everything about Meiji in the manga was new to me. I find it fascinating how quickly Japan Western-style modernized itself (although after I learned more, the results that followed in terms of colonization were not so great!), and I love the mix of Western and traditional Japanese culture in the manga, especially stuff like Saitou in his police uniform with a katana, or Soujirou's buttoned up shirt under his gi. Also, I'm sure the manga inflicted me with a lot of romanticism re: the dying of the samurai class. I still want to learn more about the girls' magazines that sprung up around this time and the whole Meiji schoolgirl thing.

Tang Dynasty China: Amazingly, I arrived at this one through history classes and not via fiction. That, and the poetry. I had to memorize a ton of stuff in Chinese classes, and a lot of them were Tang poems. Plus, the poems were the easiest to memorize because of the very strict structure, as opposed to essays written in classical Chinese or the less structured Song ci. Obviously this doesn't hold true of all Tang poetry, but it tended to be a good rule of thumb for class. When I learned more, I loved how cosmopolitan this period of history was, with various cultures meeting and interchanging things on the Silk Road, as well as the whole Yang Guifei story and the fall of High Tang period. And then there's just the city architecture of Chang'an and its influence on Gyeongju, Nara and Kyoto, as well as the overall Tang Dynasty influence on fashion in Korea and Japan (probably other stuff too. But I was very focused on the clothes).

Turn of the century Europe/US: This is more a current favorite time period in terms of historical romances! Mostly it's because I don't see very many books set around this period, but it is also because I really love the fashion. And, as with the Meiji period, the advent of modernization and the fast pace of change is something that I find really fascinating.