In 1975, after years of struggle, Communists seized control of the government of Laos. Members of the Mong culture who had helped the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency in their quest to halt the spread of Communism were forced to move to America as political refugees. The Mong, with their strong culture of oral traditions and beliefs, were plunged into a multicultural society where the written word was prevalent. As a result, their oral customs are now being slowly eroded and replaced with a written tradition. Desperate to hold on to their cultural identity and continue the traditions of their ancestors, the Mong still struggle with the dilemma this change in literary perception has caused. Compiled from numerous interviews, this volume explores the lives of 13 Mong elders. With emphasis on their unique oral tradition and cultural practices, the book discusses Mong rituals, tribal customs, religious beliefs and educational experiences. The main focus of the work, however, is the lifestyle the elders maintained while living in the mountains of Laos. In their own words, they describe their childhood, communities, religious rituals and cultural traditions as well as the ongoing struggle of adjustment to their new homeland. The work also delves into the Mong perceptions of industrialization and the generational conflict that immersion into a literate society has caused. The author himself is a member of the Mong culture and brings a personal perspective to preserving the oral traditions of this unique ethnicity. The work is also indexed.

Farmers in Laos, U.S. allies during the Vietnam War, refugees in Thailand, citizens of the Western world, the stories of the Hmong who now live in America have been told in detail through books and articles and oral histories over the past several decades. Like any immigrant group, members of the first generation may yearn for the past as they watch their children and grandchildren find their way in the dominant culture of their new home. For Hmong people born and educated in the United States, a definition of self often includes traditional practices and tight-knit family groups but also a distinctly Americanized point of view. How do Hmong Americans negotiate the expectations of these two very different cultures? This book contains a series of essays featuring a range of writing styles, leading scholars, educators, artists, and community activists who explore themes of history, culture, gender, class, family, and sexual orientation, weaving their own stories into depictions of a Hmong American community where people continue to develop complex identities that are collectively shared but deeply personal as they help to redefine the multicultural America of today.

The Routledge Handbook of Asian American Studies brings together leading scholars and scholarship to capture the state of the field of Asian American Studies, as a generation of researchers have expanded the field with new paradigms and methodological tools. Inviting readers to consider new understandings of the historical work done in the past decades and the place of Asian Americans in a larger global context, this ground-breaking volume illuminates how research in the field of Asian American Studies has progressed. Previous work in the field has focused on establishing a place for Asian Americans within American history. This volume engages more contemporary research, which draws on new archives, art, literature, film, and music, to examine how Asian Americans are redefining their national identities, and to show how race interacts with gender, sexuality, class, and the built environment, to reveal the diversity of the United States. Organized into five parts, and addressing a multitude of interdisciplinary areas of interest to Asian American scholars, it covers: • a reframing of key themes such as transnationality, postcolonialism, and critical race theory • U.S. imperialism and its impact on Asian Americans • war and displacement • the garment industry • Asian Americans and sports • race and the built environment • social change and political participation • and many more themes. Exploring people, practice, politics, and places, this cutting-edge volume brings together the best themes current in Asian American Studies today, and is a vital reference for all researchers in the field.

TURNING ON LEARNING How do you practice multicultural education in the classroom? Put the principles of diversity to work???and turn your students on to learning! How can a teacher work with diversity, putting theory into practice to excite students and improve their academic achievement? With a wealth of ready-to-use lesson plans for grade levels K-12 covering a variety of subject areas, Turning on Learning, Fifth Edition shows you how to apply the principles of multicultural education in your classroom. This practical, lesson-based companion to Sleeter and Grant???s Making Choices for Multicultural Education: Five Approaches to Race, Class, and Gender offers a complete toolbox of ready-to-use lesson plans covering a variety of subject areas for grades K-12. This text features additional lesson plans and new resource material, along with updates of existing lesson plans. What do we mean by multicultural education? The Sixth Edition of Making Choices for Multicultural Education explores the latest theoretical perspectives on race, language, culture, class, gender, and disability in teaching, and encourages you to examine your own personal beliefs about classroom diversity.

The Hmong (pronounced "mong" in English) are a mountain-dwelling subgroup of the Miao of southwest China. In the 18th and 19th centuries, the Hmong began migrating southeast to Vietnam, Laos, and Thailand. Then in the second half of the 20th century, due mainly to their participation in the Second Indochina War (1954-1975), the Hmong began migrating to the West. Today, the Hmong are one of the fastest growing ethnic origin populations in the United States, growing from about 94,000 in the 1990 census to about 190,000 in the U.S. census bureau's 2005 American Community Survey. With this rapid expansion in the population, a substantially increased interest in Hmong-related written works, multimedia materials, and websites among students, scholars, service professionals, and the general public has arisen. To help meet that interest, author Mark E. Pfeifer has compiled Hmong-Related Works 1996-2006: An Annotated Bibliography, which includes full reference information (including internet links to articles where available) and descriptive summaries for 610 Hmong-related works.

In the connected highlands of southwest China, Vietnam, and Laos, recalling the past is a highly sensitive act. Among local societies, many may actively avoid recalling the past for fear of endangering themselves and others. Oral traditions and rare archives remain the main avenues to visit the past, but the national revolutionary narrative and the language of heritagization have strongly affected the local expression of historical memory. Yet this does not prevent local societies from producing their stories in their own terms, even if often in conflict with both national and Western categories. Producing history, ethnohistory, historical anthropology, and historical geography in the Southeast Asian highlands raises significant questions relating to methodology, epistemology, and ethics, for which most researchers are often ill-prepared. How can scholars manage to competently access information about the past? How is one to capture history-in-the-making through events, speech acts, rituals, and performances? How is the memory of the past transmitted—or not—and with what logic? Based on the experiences and reflections of a dozen diverse scholars rooted in decades of work in these three communist states, Chasing Traces is the first book about historical ethnography and related issues in the Southeast Asian highlands. Taking a critically reflexive posture, the authors make a plea for the individual, the hidden, and the backstage, for what life is really like on the ground, as opposed to imagined homogeneity, legibility, and unambiguousness. Their investigations on the history of ethnic minority communities adds archival historiography to ethnographic fieldwork and examines the relationship between the two fields. The individual chapters each tell distinctive stories of the conjunction of fieldwork, archival research, official surveillance, community participation, cultural norms, partnership with local scholars, and the other factors that both facilitate and frustrate the research enterprise of writing about the past in these societies. A timely work, this volume also provides guidelines for alternative ways to document and reflect when physical access becomes limited due to factors such as pandemic, political instability, and violence, and offers creative ways for researchers to cope with these dramatic shifts.

Preeminent scholar and translator David R. McCann presents an anthology of his own translations of works ranging across the major genres and authors of Korean writing--stories, legends, poems, historical vignettes, and other works--and a set of critical essays on major themes. A brief history of traditional Korean literature orients the reader to the historical context of the writings, thus bringing into focus this rich literary tradition. The anthology of translations begins with the Samguk sagi, or History of the Three Kingdoms, written in 1145, and ends with "The Story of Master Hô," written in the late 1700s. Three exploratory essays of particular subtlety and lucidity raise interpretive and comparative issues that provide a creative, sophisticated framework for approaching the selections.