"This volume is a memorial tribute to the late Professor F. Earl Swisher. Born in Lyons, Kansas, July 22, 1902, he was a member of the pioneer generation of American scholars to study China. His early life offered no indication that he would become involved in Chinese studies. At an early age he moved with his family to Palisades, Colorado, where his father owned a farm. There he completed his public education. He was an avid reader as a student, and by the time of his graduation had exhaustea the libraries of his teachers and school. He entered the University of Colorado in 1920, majoring in history. Although he received an academic scholarship, he had to work his way through the University. In May 1924, he was graduated with. honors. Still he was uncertain about his career. While walking across campus to work one day shortly before graduation, he was caught in a typical Colorado cloudburst. He found shelter in a nearby building being used by Canton Christian College to recruit faculty for the forthcoming year. Waiting for the rain to stop, Swisher expressed a mild interest in a position at the College and left his name and address. He was somewhat surprised several weeks later to be offered a contract. By the end of August, he had arrived in Canton to assume his duties."

Dynamite on the Tropic of Cancer is the radical, explosive retelling of the first decade of the 'Father of Modern China' Dr Sun Yatsen’s globally shaped formation as a professional revolutionist, and of the impact of the adult Sun’s revolutionary relationship with Hawaiʻi and with his varied communities of supporters there during its own most turbulent political decade, the 1890s, years in which this remote island nation transformed from native monarchy, via sovereign independent republic, to become the USA’s first overseas territory. Drawn from neglected primary sources, Dynamite reveals the hitherto untold story of the secret revolutionary alliance forged in Honolulu’s backstreets between Sun’s Xingzhonghui and the idiosyncratic italophile soldier Robert Wilcox, "Hawaiʻi’s Garibaldi" and leader of the Kanaka/Native Hawaiian counterrevolution of January 1895. This failed uprising to restore Hawaiʻi’s tragic last Queen, witnessed firsthand by Sun Yatsen, became the archetype upon which ten months later Sun would base his own first attempt at armed insurrection in China: the Canton uprising of 26 October 1895. With an epic sweep across the Pacific’s Tropic of Cancer, Dynamite is the most important study yet written on the origins of Sun Yatsen’s Chinese Revolution and its dynamic interface with Hawaiian history.

When the Chinese Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution (GPCR) of the middle and late 1960s burst forth, the initial response both in China and the West seemed primarily to be one of mystification. The spectacle of severe splits among leaders long thought to be compatible, of armed struggles between factional units whose uniform pledges to Chairman Mao and the Party Center appeared to make their similarities greater than their differences, and of destructive Red Guards who were bent on "tearing down the old world to build a new one" was at first difficult to explain.

By studying six different aspects of culture in Canton in the period between the two World Wars, this book helps broaden our limited knowledge of the social and cultural lives of the common people in this largest city of South China. The author examines how the Cantonese in this period indulged in their imagined cultural superiority as "modern" citizens, ushering in a cult of the modern city. During this period, Cantonese opera was also emerging and evolving into a widely accepted form of commercialised mass entertainment. The process of social and cultural change and its impact on the development of this city and its people are revealed throughout the book. This book also aims to redress some major misconceptions of the socio-cultural realities as seen in official rhetoric or academic discourse on the matters of patriotism and anti-foreignism, gambling, prostitution, and opium consumption. Contemporary non-official and folk materials reveal that the common people were much more pro-Western than xenophobic in attitude, and the alleged social and political "calamities" of gambling, opium consumption and prostitution were more rhetorical than real. Understanding Canton provides us with, not only a fuller and more comprehensive picture of city life and popular mentalities, but also an important clue to understand how and why the social history of this city was distorted and constructed in ways that suited the political ideology and nation-building agenda of the ruling regimes.

International scholars and sinologists discuss culture, economic growth, social change, political processes, and foreign influences in China since the earliest pre-dynastic period.

"In addition, Barton reappraises the reign of Gustav IV Adolf and the succession crises of 1809-10. He examines the increasing tension between the Pan-Scandinavian movement and the rising Finnish national movement. He deals with the historians of the Danish Agrarian Reforms of 1784-1814, parallel developments in Finland and Norway between 1808 and 1917, the discovery of Norway abroad, Swedish national romanticism, and Sweden's transition from a warfare state to a welfare state, exemplifying the rational and humane ideals of the twentieth century."--BOOK JACKET.

During the 1920s the Soviet Union made a determined effort to stimulate revolution in China, sending several scores of military and political advisers there, as well as arms and money to influence political developments. The usual secrecy surrounding Soviet foreign intervention was broken when the Chinese government seized a mass of documents in a raid on the Soviet military headquarters in Peking in 1927. 'Missionaries of Revolution' weaves together information gleaned from these documents with contemporary historical materials.

Sun Yatsen (1866-1925) occupies a unique position in modern Chinese history: he is equally venerated as the founding father of the nation by both the mainland Communist government and its Nationalist rival in Taiwan. The first president of the Republic of China in 1911-12, the peasant-born yet Western-trained Dr Sun was also a dedicated political theorist, constantly in search of the ideal political and constitutional blueprint to underpin his incomplete revolution. A decade before the public emergence in Japan of his ‘Three Principles of the People’, and weeks before even his first slim publication in 1897, Kidnapped in London, Sun was already hard at work in the Reading Room of the British Museum, planning his most ambitious book yet: a comprehensive political treatise in English on the tyrannical misgovernment of the Chinese nation by the Manchus of the Qing Dynasty. Started then abandoned twice over, destined never to be completed, let alone published, we can only conjecture what title this revolutionary book might have had. The Lost Book of Sun Yatsen and Edwin Collins is the first study of this lost work in all scholarship, Western or Chinese. It draws its originality and its themes from three primary sources, all presented here for the first time. The first is a series of interconnected lost writings co-authored by Sun Yatsen between 1896 and 1898. The second is the mass of lost political interviews with, and articles dedicated to, Sun Yatsen and his politics, first published in the British press in the aftermath the dramatic world-famous rescue of Sun from inside the Chinese Legation in London in 1896. The third source is the ‘Apostle of the Simple Life for Children’, the Anglo-Jewish Rabbi Edwin Collins (1858-1936), a devotee and practitioner of Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Émile and the New Education movement it inspired, who became Sun’s writing collaborator of choice during his years of political exile from China. Drawing on this wealth of neglected material, Patrick Anderson’s book offers a genuinely fresh perspective on Sun Yatsen and his political motivations and beliefs.