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How did ordinary people live through the extraordinary changes that have swept across modern China? How did peasants transform themselves into urbanites? How did the citizens of Shanghai cope with the epic upheavals—revolution, war, and again revolution—that shook their lives? Even after decades of scholarship devoted to modern Chinese history, our understanding of the daily lives of the common people of China remains sketchy and incomplete. In this carefully researched study, Hanchao Lu weaves rich documentary data with ethnographic surveys and interviews to reconstruct the fabric of everyday life in China's largest and most complex city in the first half of this century.
How did people live through the extraordinary changes that have swept across modern China? How did peasants transform themselves into urbanites? This study weaves documentary data with ethnographic surveys and interviews to reconstruct the fabric of everyday life in Shanghai in early 20th century.
This is a rich and comprehensive study of beggars’ culture and the institution of mendicancy in China from late imperial times to the mid-twentieth century, with a glance at the resurgence of beggars in China today. Generously illustrated, the book brings to life the concepts and practices of mendicancy including organized begging, state and society relations as reflected in the issues of poverty, public opinions of beggars and various factors that contribute to almsgiving, the role of gender in begging, and street people and Communist politics. Panoramically, the reader will see that the culture and institution of Chinese mendicancy, which had its origins in earlier centuries, remained remarkably consistent through time and space and that there were perennial and lively interactions between the world of beggars and mainstream society.
An innovative study of colonialism in China, examining Shanghai's International Settlement as the site of key developments in the Republican period.
French colonisers of the Third Republic claimed not to oppress but to liberate, imagining they were spreading republican ideals to the colonies to make a Greater France. In this book Simon Dell explores the various roles played by portraiture in this colonial imaginary. Anyone interested in the history of colonial Africa will have encountered innumerable portraits of African elites produced during the first half of the twentieth century, yet no book to date has focused on these ubiquitous images. Dell analyses the production and dissemination of such portraits and situates them in a complex and conflicted field of representations. Moving between European and African perspectives, The Portrait and the Colonial Imaginary blends history with art history to provide insights into the larger processes that were transforming the French metropole and colonies during the early twentieth century. This publication is GPRC-labeled (Guaranteed Peer-Reviewed Content).
This book is a collection of translations from Old Photos, a Chinese bimonthly publication launched in 1996 that presents photographs and narratives from ordinary readers and professional historians in a manner that proclaims: this is our history, not the history those above would have us believe. The magazine was concerned with the everyday lives of ordinary people while also covering the momentous, often traumatic, political life of the People's Republic. It became clear it would also serve as a forum and archive for people's experiences and reflections about life in the People's Republic. Old Photos presented an open format where readers' contributions were published alongside that of professional writers, historians', and novelists.
The essays in this volume analyze and compare what it means to be Hakka in a variety of sociocultural, political, geographical, and historical contexts including Malaysia, Hong Kong, Calcutta, Taiwan, and contemporary China.
Out to Work is a fresh, engaging account of the lives of a group of migrant women who, while in their teens, moved from rural towns to Beijing to take up work as maids, office cleaners, hotel chambermaids, and migrant schoolteachers. Part of the vanguard of China's great rural-urban migration in the 1990s, these women were deprived of an education because their parents were unable to pay school fees for both sons and daughters. They also faced strong objections from parents, who feared for their daughters' safety and reputations. Gaetano kept in touch with several women for over a decade, and her longitudinal perspective and biographical focus provide a rich empirical basis for her analysis....
Essays address expressions of modernity in relation to non-Western politics and national cultures. Topics range from the installation of gas streetlights in Shanghai to urban planning efforts aimed at improving daily routines of work and leisure.
What forces shaped the twentieth-century world? Capitalism and communism are usually seen as engaged in a fight-to-the-death during the Cold War. With the establishment of the People's Republic of China in 1949, the Chinese Communist Party aimed to end capitalism. Karl Gerth argues that despite the socialist rhetoric of class warfare and egalitarianism, Communist Party policies actually developed a variety of capitalism and expanded consumerism. This negated the goals of the Communist Revolution across the Mao era (1949–1976) down to the present. Through topics related to state attempts to manage what people began to desire - wristwatches and bicycles, films and fashion, leisure travel and Mao badges - Gerth challenges fundamental assumptions about capitalism, communism, and countries conventionally labeled as socialist. In so doing, his provocative history of China suggests how larger forces related to the desire for mass-produced consumer goods reshaped the twentieth-century world and remade people's lives.