Climbing the Great Wall yesterday was great but my body wasn’t feeling too great this morning. I spent the morning hours resting and reading in Bed. At around 1:00PM, I decided to check out Jingshan park which is only about a five minute walk from my hotel. Like many of these places in Beijing, it […]
Visits to Jingshan and Beihai Parks Read More »
The Great Wall is absolutely one of the places to see on a visit to Beijing. It is one of the wonders of the ancient world and it has been in my list of places to visit for a long time. The wall was built by the first Emperor of China, Qin Shi Huang between
Visit to the Great Wall at Badaling Read More »
Being a Sunday, the only thing in my agenda today was finding a church to worship. Finding a Catholic church to attend Mass was easier than I had thought. Keep in mind that the Communist government in China upholds an atheistic ideology. Working Communist Party officials are prohibited from belonging to a religious organization. Recently,
Worshipping at a Catholic Church Read More »
I mentioned in my last post that I was just going to follow the flow. Today was time for me to check out the Hutongs. If you are not familiar with these, they are narrow streets in Beijing and other northern Chinese cities. On each side of the street are courtyard (compound-like) residences where the
Visit to Tiananmen Square Read More »
It is always fun when I get to fly for free. In the last year, I have accumulated over 150,000 frequent flyer miles on American Airlines and I have been wondering how to use them. I tried using them to book trips to Africa or Europe, but the airline taxes have always been prohibitive. It
Welcome to Beijing Read More »
It was Christmas Eve last year when I saw the BBC headline “Nigeria Boko Haram: Militants ‘technically defeated’- Buhari”. What immediately came to mind was George W. Bush’s “Mission Accomplished” banner. I was taken aback by this headline because the media reports prior to this day gave no indications that Boko Haram had been
President Muhammadu Buhari’s Boko Haram Delusion Read More »
In 1945, the British Parliament passed the Colonial Development and Welfare Act to deal with the social welfare needs of the colonies. Three years later, the Overseas Resources Development Act was passed. The goal of this Act was to supplement what private enterprises were already doing in the colonies. There were areas where private enterprises were
Memories of the East African Groundnut Scheme, Kongwa Read More »
President Muhammadu Buhari and his ruling All Progressive Congress (APC) party have no plans on how to rescue Nigeria from its economic malaise. Since they came into power in May of 2015, they have gradually reneged for on all the promises they made to Nigerians and have used the anti-corruption crusade as a way of
President Muhammadu Buhari’s Anti-Corruption Sham In Nigeria Read More »
Textmining Colonialism Nigerian Annual Colonial Reports, 1897-1938 As a historian, I privilege physical archives. I love to touch the original documents, smell them and mentally go back in time to when they were created. I had some skepticisms when I ventured into textmining these annual colonial reports. Most of my research has been on colonial
A Reflection on my Project Textmining Colonialism Read More »
Computers and search technology have changed the way we process text. Google Drive’s search is so good that it can extract key information from a scanned purchase receipt. While computer text has been growing rapidly in the last several years, we must not forget the millions of pages of hand and type writer generated text
Crowdsourcing Digitization Projects Read More »