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"CHINESE HISTORY"
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Coolies and cane : race, labor, and sugar in the age of emancipation
2007 Winner of the Merle Curti Intellectual History Award of the Organization of American Historians, 2006 Winner of the History/Social Science Book Award of the Association of Asian American Studies
How did thousands of Chinese migrants end up working alongside African Americans in Louisiana after the Civil War? With the stories of these workers, Coolies and Cane advances an interpretation of emancipation that moves beyond U.S. borders and the black-white racial dynamic. Tracing American ideas of Asian labor to the sugar plantations of the Caribbean, Moon-Ho Jung argues that the racial formation of \"coolies\" in American culture and law played a pivotal role in reconstructing concepts of race, nation, and citizenship in the United States.
Jung examines how coolies appeared in major U.S. political debates on race, labor, and immigration between the 1830s and 1880s. He finds that racial notions of coolies were articulated in many, often contradictory, ways. They could mark the progress of freedom; they could also symbolize the barbarism of slavery. Welcomed and rejected as neither black nor white, coolies emerged recurrently as both the salvation of the fracturing and reuniting nation and the scourge of American civilization.
Based on extensive archival research, this study makes sense of these contradictions to reveal how American impulses to recruit and exclude coolies enabled and justified a series of historical transitions: from slave-trade laws to racially coded immigration laws, from a slaveholding nation to a \"nation of immigrants, \" and from a continental empire of manifest destiny to a liberating empire across the seas.
Combining political, cultural, and social history, Coolies and Cane is a compelling study of race, Reconstruction, and Asian American history.
eBook
From Canton Restaurant to Panda Express
From Canton Restaurant to Panda Expresstakes readers on a compelling journey from the California Gold Rush to the present, letting readers witness both the profusion of Chinese restaurants across the United States and the evolution of many distinct American-Chinese iconic dishes from chop suey to General Tso's chicken. Along the way, historian Haiming Liu explains how the immigrants adapted their traditional food to suit local palates, and gives readers a taste of Chinese cuisine embedded in the bittersweet story of Chinese Americans.Treating food as a social history, Liu explores why Chinese food changed and how it has influenced American culinary culture, and how Chinese restaurants have become places where shared ethnic identity is affirmed-not only for Chinese immigrants but also for American Jews. The book also includes a look at national chains like P. F. Chang's and a consideration of how Chinese food culture continues to spread around the globe.Drawing from hundreds of historical and contemporary newspaper reports, journal articles, and writings on food in both English and Chinese,From Canton Restaurant to Panda Expressrepresents a groundbreaking piece of scholarly research. It can be enjoyed equally as a fascinating set of stories about Chinese migration, cultural negotiation, race and ethnicity, diverse flavored Chinese cuisine and its share in American food market today.
eBook
Bone, Bronze, and Bamboo
Bone, Bronze, and Bamboo explores the tremendous wealth of
newly unearthed artifacts and manuscripts that have been
revolutionizing the study of early China. Leading scholars from
China and abroad lend their expertise in archaeology, art history,
paleography, intellectual history, and many other disciplines to
show how these fascinating finds change our understanding of
China's past. Organized in a chronological progression from the
Shang to Han periods, and treating bone, bronze, and bamboo-strip
artifacts in turn, the book treats a wide breadth of topics, from
the status of owls in Shang religion to the Zhou court's economic
interest in managing salt resources, and from the conceptual
evolution of de 德 in Spring and Autumn covenants to the
interplay between materiality and text in Han scribal primers.
Bone, Bronze, and Bamboo exemplifies the exciting energy
and sense of discovery inspired by these sources in recent years,
while surveying the latest debates and developments shaping early
China as a field.
eBook
Kingdom of characters : the language revolution that made China modern
\"After a meteoric rise, China today is one of the world's most powerful nations. Just a century ago, it was a crumbling empire, with literacy reserved for the elite few. In Kingdom of Characters, Jing Tsu argues that China's greatest and most daunting challenge was a linguistic one. Just as important as China's technological and industrial advances and political maneuvers was the century-long fight to make the Chinese language-with its many dialects and complex character-based script-accessible to the modern world of global trade and digital technology. Kingdom of Characters follows the bold and cunning innovators who adapted the Chinese language to a world defined by the West and its alphabet: the exiled reformer who risked a death sentence to advocate for Mandarin as a national language, the Chinese Muslim poet who laid the groundwork for Chairman Mao's phonetic writing system, the imprisoned computer engineer who devised input codes for Chinese characters on the lid of a tea cup, among others. Without the advances they enabled, China might never have become the dominating force we know today. The revolution of the Chinese script is just as breathtaking as China's transformation into a capitalist juggernaut, in large part because those linguistic innovations literally enabled China's reinvention. With larger-than-life characters and an unexpected perspective on the major events of China's tumultuous twentieth century, Tsu reveals how language is both a technology to be perfected and a subtle yet potent power to be exercised and expanded\"-- Provided by publisher.
BOOK
Chow chop suey
Chinese food first became popular in America under the shadow of violence against Chinese aliens, a despised racial minority ineligible for United States citizenship. The founding of late-nineteenth-century chop suey restaurants that pitched an altered version of Cantonese cuisine to white patrons despite a virulently anti-Chinese climate is one of several pivotal events in Anne Mendelsons thoughtful history of American Chinese food. Chow Chop Suey uses cooking to trace different stages of the Chinese communitys footing in the larger white society.Mendelson begins with the arrival of men from the poorest district of Canton Province during the Gold Rush. She describes the formation of American Chinatowns and examines the curious racial dynamic underlying the purposeful invention of hybridized Chinese American food, historically prepared by Cantonese-descended cooks for whites incapable of grasping Chinese culinary principles. Mendelson then follows the eventual abolition of anti-Chinese immigration laws and the many demographic changes that transformed the face of Chinese cooking in America during and after the Cold War. Mendelson concludes with the post-1965 arrival of Chinese immigrants from Taiwan, Southeast Asia, and many regions of mainland China. As she shows, they have immeasurably enriched Chinese cooking in America but tend to form comparatively self-sufficient enclaves in which they, unlike their predecessors, are not dependent on cooking for a white clientele.
eBook
Against the Law
This study opens a critical perspective on the slow death of socialism and the rebirth of capitalism in the world's most dynamic and populous country. Based on remarkable fieldwork and extensive interviews in Chinese textile, apparel, machinery, and household appliance factories, Against the Law finds a rising tide of labor unrest mostly hidden from the world's attention. Providing a broad political and economic analysis of this labor struggle together with fine-grained ethnographic detail, the book portrays the Chinese working class as workers' stories unfold in bankrupt state factories and global sweatshops, in crowded dormitories and remote villages, at street protests as well as in quiet disenchantment with the corrupt officialdom and the fledgling legal system.
eBook