San Antonio College Library

Depicts life among the nine hundred million peasants who inhabit the rural areas of China, revealing the destitute conditions under which they live and the reasons why they have been excluded from China's economic revolution.

"The Power of Everyday Politics is an authoritative account, based on extensive research in Vietnam's National Archives and in the Red River Delta countryside, of the formation of collective farms in northern Vietnam in the late 1950s, their enlargement during wartime in the 1960s and 1970s, and their collapse in the 1980s. As Benedict J. Tria Kerkvliet shows, the Vietnamese government eventually terminated the system, but not for ideological reasons....

This compelling text and dramatic photographic essay convey the emotional power of the death rituals of a small Greek village--the funeral, the singing of laments, the distribution of food, the daily visits to the graves, and especially the rite of exhumation. These rituals help Greek villagers face the universal paradox of mourning: how can the living sustain relationships with the dead and at the same time bring them to an end, in order to continue...

"A tale of rural rebellion unfolds in Bruce Gilley's moving chronicle of a village on the northern China plains during the post-1978 economic reform era. Gilley examines how Daqiu Village, led by Yu Zuomin, a charismatic Communist Party secretary and president of the local industrial conglomerate, became the richest village in China and a model for the rural reforms of the 1980s and early 1990s. A growing campaign of political resistance led to increasing...

"In this pioneering work of cultural history, historian Anthony Harkins argues that the hillbilly - in his various guises of "briar hopper," "brush ape," "ridge runner," and "while trash"--Has been viewed by mainstream Americans simultaneously as a violent degenerate who threatens the modern order and as a keeper of traditional values of family, home, and physical production, and thus symbolic of a nostalgic past free of the problems of contemporary...

"As the nineteenth century ended in Hunt County, Texas, a way of life was dying. The tightly knit, fiercely independent society of the yeomen farmers - "plain folk," as historians have often dubbed them - was being swallowed up by the rising tide of a rapidly changing, cotton-based economy. A social network based on family, religion, and community was falling prey to crippling debt and resulting loss of land ownership. For many of the rural people...