Scholarly study of the Chinese republic (1911-1949) has traditionally viewed the period through its shortcomings - notably its failure to establish a secure political order - thus allowing the chaos and violence of national power politics to overshadow formative developments taking place at the local level. By focusing on the interaction of local politics and the central state, Helen Chauncey argues for the importance of local initiative in defining the post-imperial state and suggests a rethinking of our understanding of republican-period politics. Through the prism of educational circles in central Jiangsu province, Schoolhouse Politicians challenges assumptions about local elite conservatism by showing how actively politics were pursued in local municipalities well removed from traditional centers of wealth and power. It highlights the activism of political entrepreneurs in the arena of local schooling and interprets the apparent disorderly conduct of local republican politics in terms of the strategies activists used to test their right to public association with the central state and to determine what concerns could be addressed through such an association. Pursuing a comprehensive approach to the study of local politics, this interpretation is sensitive to political intent in a variety of cultural representations, from school journals to teachers' assemblies to the physical management of public space such as schoolhouses and exercise yards. Schoolhouse Politicians makes a compelling case for the central importance of its immediate subject - the growth of the elementary and secondary educational establishment - as well as illuminating larger questions of state-building. This carefully crafted local history, based on pioneering research, is of significance to the field of modern Chinese history. It is also a valuable addition to the recent comparative literature on state-making that seeks, by exploring a variety of occupations and social groups neglected by traditional histories, to give due importance to those little-studied experiences that helped shape the potential and limits of the modern state.

In the early 1900s, the Qing dynasty implemented a nationwide school system as part of a series of institutional reforms to shore up its power. A School in Every Village recounts how villagers and local state officials in Haicheng County enacted orders to establish rural primary schools from 1904 to 1931. Although the Communists, contemporary observers, and more recent scholarship have all depicted rural society as feudal and backward and the educational reforms of the early twentieth century a failure, Elizabeth VanderVen draws on untapped archival materials to reveal that villagers capably integrated foreign ideas and models into a system that was at once traditional and modern, Chinese and Western. Her portrait of education reform not only challenges received notions about the modernity-tradition binary in Chinese history, it also addresses topics central to scholarly debates on modern China, including state making, gender, and the impact of global ideas on local society.

On June 11, 1963, in a dramatic gesture that caught the nation's attention, Governor George Wallace physically blocked the entrance to Foster Auditorium on the University of Alabama's campus. His intent was to defy Attorney General Nicholas Katzenbach, sent on behalf of the Kennedy administration to force Alabama to accept court-ordered desegregation. After a tense confrontation, President Kennedy federalized the Alabama National Guard and Wallace backed down, allowing Vivian Malone and James Hood to become the first African Americans to enroll successfully at their state's flagship university. That night, John F. Kennedy went on television to declare civil rights a "moral issue" and to commit his administration to this cause. That same night, Medgar Evers was shot dead. In The Schoolhouse Door, E. Culpepper Clark provides a riveting account of the events that led to Wallace's historic stand, tracing a tangle of intrigue and resistance that stretched from the 1940s, when the university rejected black applicants outright, to the post-Brown v. Board of Education era. We are there in July 1955 when Thurgood Marshall and lawyers at the NAACP Legal Defense Fund win for Autherine Lucy and "all similarly situated" the right to enroll at the university. We are in the car with Lucy in February 1956 as university officials escort her to class, shielding her from a mob jeering "Lynch the nigger," "Keep 'Bama white," and "hit the nigger whore." (After only three days, these demonstrations resulted in Lucy's expulsion.) Clark exposes the many means, including threats and intimidation, used by university and state officials to discourage black applicants following the Lucy episode. And he explains how University of Alabama president Frank Anthony Rose eventually cooperated with the Kennedy administration to ensure a smooth transition toward desegregation. We also witness Robert Kennedy's remarkable face-to-face plea for Wallace's cooperation and the governor's adamant refusal: "I will never submit voluntarily to any integration in a school system in Alabama." As Clark writes, Wallace's carefully orchestrated surrender would leave the forces of white supremacy free to fight another day. And the Kennedys' public embrace of the civil rights movement would set in motion a political transformation that changed the presidential base of the Democratic party for the next thirty years. In these pages, full of courageous black applicants, fist-shaking demonstrators, and powerful politicians, Clark captures the dramatic confrontations that transformed the University of Alabama into a proving ground for the civil rights movement and gave the nation unforgettable symbols for its struggle to achieve racial justice.

A comprehensive collection on twentieth-century educational practices in China

"Mapping Meanings," a broad-ranged introduction to China's intellectual entry into the family of nations, guides the reader into the late Qing encounter with Western, at the same time connecting convincingly to the broader question of the mobility of knowledge.

In this first social and cultural history of Japan's construction of Manchuria, Louise Young offers an incisive examination of the nature of Japanese imperialism. Focusing on the domestic impact of Japan's activities in Northeast China between 1931 and 1945, Young considers "metropolitan effects" of empire building: how people at home imagined and experienced the empire they called Manchukuo. Contrary to the conventional assumption that a few army officers and bureaucrats were responsible for Japan's overseas expansion, Young finds that a variety of organizations helped to mobilize popular support for Manchukuo—the mass media, the academy, chambers of commerce, women's organizations, youth groups, and agricultural cooperatives—leading to broad-based support among diverse groups of Japanese. As the empire was being built in China, Young shows, an imagined Manchukuo was emerging at home, constructed of visions of a defensive lifeline, a developing economy, and a settler's paradise.

A collection of 13 essays based on two national surveys of household income in China - in 1985 and 1995 - and prepared and carried out by the research team. These essays explore a wide range of aspects of the rapidly changing income distribution during this period.

Over the past fifty years, the federal government's efforts to reform American public education have transformed U.S. schools from locally-run enterprises into complex systems jointly constructed by federal, state, and local actors. The construction of this federal schoolhouse-an educational system with common national expectations and practices-has fundamentally altered both education politics and the norms governing educational policy at the local level. Building the Federal Schoolhouse examines these issues through an in-depth, fifty-year examination of federal educational policies in the community of Alexandria, Virginia, a wealthy yet socially diverse suburb of Washington, D.C. The epochal social transformations that swept through America in the past half century hit Alexandria with particular force, transforming its Jim Crow school system into a new immigrant gateway district within two generations. Along the way, the school system has struggled to provide quality education for special needs students, and has sought to overcome the legacies of tracking and segregated learning while simultaneously retaining upper-middle class students. Most recently, it has grappled with state and federally imposed accountability measures that seek to boost educational outcomes. All of these policy initiatives have contended with the existing political regime within Alexandria, at times forcing it to a breaking point, and at other times reconstructing it. All the while, the local expectations and governing realities of administrators, parents, politicians, and voters have sharply constrained federal initiatives, limiting their scope when in conflict with local commitments and amplifying them when they align. Through an extensive use of local archives, contemporary accounts, school data, and interviews, Douglas S. Reed not only paints an intimate portrait of the conflicts that the federal schoolhouse's creation has wrought in Alexandria, but also documents the successes of the federal commitment to greater educational opportunity. In so doing, he highlights the complexity of the American education state and the centrality of local regimes and local historical context to federal educational reform efforts.

"We live in a world shaped by secularism—the separation of numinous power from political authority and religion from the political, social, and economic realms of public life. Not only has progress toward modernity often been equated with secularization, but when religion is admitted into modernity, it has been distinguished from superstition. That such ideas are continually contested does not undercut their extraordinary influence. These divisions underpin this investigation of the role of religion in the construction of modernity and political power during the Nanjing Decade (1927–1937) of Nationalist rule in China. This book explores the modern recategorization of religious practices and people and examines how state power affected the religious lives and physical order of local communities. It also looks at how politicians conceived of their own ritual role in an era when authority was meant to derive from popular sovereignty. The claims of secular nationalism and mobilizational politics prompted the Nationalists to conceive of the world of religious association as a dangerous realm of “superstition” that would destroy the nation. This is the first “superstitious regime” of the book’s title. It also convinced them that national feeling and faith in the party-state would replace those ties—the second “superstitious regime.”"

Exploring one of the most dynamic and contested regions of the world, this series includes works on political, economic, cultural, and social changes in modern and contemporary Asia and the Pacific. The leading specialist on China's twentieth century peasant resistance reexamines, in bold and original ways, the question: Was the Chinese peasantry a revolutionary force? Where most scholarly attention has focused on Communist-led peasant movements, Bianco's story is one of peasant thought and action largely unmediated by modern political parties. This volume pays particular attention to the first half of the twentieth century when peasant-based conflict, ranging from tax and food protests to secret society conflicts, opium struggles, inter-communal conflicts, and tenant protests over rent, was central to nationwide revolutionary processes.