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How do we explain the surprising trajectory of the Chinese Communist revolution? Why has it taken such a different route from its Russian prototype? An answer, Elizabeth Perry suggests, lies in the Chinese Communists’ creative development and deployment of cultural resources – during their revolutionary rise to power and afterwards. Skillful “cultural positioning” and “cultural patronage,” on the part of Mao Zedong, his comrades and successors, helped to construct a polity in which a once alien Communist system came to be accepted as familiarly “Chinese.” Perry traces this process through a case study of the Anyuan coal mine, a place where Mao and other early leaders of the Chinese Communist Party mobilized an influential labor movement at the beginning of their revolution, and whose history later became a touchstone of “political correctness” in the People’s Republic of China. Once known as “China’s Little Moscow,” Anyuan came over time to symbolize a distinctively Chinese revolutionary tradition. Yet the meanings of that tradition remain highly contested, as contemporary Chinese debate their revolutionary past in search of a new political future.

This book is a forceful examination of how and why a state-level revolt against welfare, begun in the late 1940s, was transformed into a national-level assault that destroyed a critical part of the nation’s safety net, with tragic consequences for American society. With a wealth of original research, the book puts recent debates about the contemporary welfare backlash into an historical perspective. It provides a closer look at these early anti-welfare campaigns, showing why they were more successful in some states than others and how opponents of welfare sometimes targeted Puerto Ricans and Chicanos as well as blacks for cutbacks. The book’s research reveals both the continuities and changes in American welfare opposition from the late 1940s to the present. The book brings new evidence to light that reveals how large farmers and racist politicians, concerned about the supply of cheap labor, appealed to white voters’ racial resentments and stereotypes about unwed mothers, blacks, and immigrants in the 1950s. It then examines congressional failure to replace the current welfare system with a more popular alternative in the 1960s and 1970s, which paved the way for national assaults on welfare. Taking a fresh look at recent debates on welfare reform, the book explores how and why politicians competing for the white vote and right-wing think tanks promoting business interests appeased the Christian right and manufactured consent for cutbacks through a powerful, racially coded discourse. Finally, through firsthand testimonies, the book vividly portrays the tragic consequences of current welfare policies and calls for a bold new agenda for working families.

A social transformation of profound proportions has been unfolding over the second half of the twentieth century as women have turned from household work to wages as the key source of their livelihood. This study, a broad comparative analysis of African American women's and white women's changing relationships to home and work over the past forty years, provides an overview of how this shift is influencing the shape of families and the American economy. The book brings together diverse issues and statistics—the plight of single mothers; the time crunch faced by many parents; the problem of housework; patterns of work, employment and marriage; and much more—in an analysis that draws from history, economics, political science, sociology, government documents, and census data to put gender at the center of the social and economic changes of the past decades.