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User:CWH/Scratches on Our Minds

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Scratches on Our Minds is a book published by Harold Isaacs that in 1958, and frequently reprinted in following decades.

As late as 2008, Jeffrey Wasserstrom recommended it as "one of the best places to begin a discussion of the long-term evolution of the American China Dream and American China Nightmare" [1] The economist Amartya Sen wrote that

Sen, Amartya. “Indian Traditions & the Western Imagination.” Daedalus 134, no. 4 (2005): 168–85. http://www.jstor.org/stable/20028020.

Structure and argument

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“These American images of China tend largely to come in jostling pairs.” [70]

  • 1. The Age of Respect (Eighteenth Century)
  • 2. The Age of Contempt (1840-1905)
  • 3. The Age of Benevolence (1905-1937)
  • 4. The Age of Admiration (1937-1944)
  • 5. The Age of Disenchantment (1944-1949)
  • 6. The Age of Hostility (1949 - 0


Reception

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The review of the first edition in the Sunday New York Times, called Isaacs a "kind of commuter between the journalistic and academic worlds." [2] The reviewer in Journal of Asian Studies objected that the book was "not written with complete theoretical rigor" and that Isaacs mentions no checks or controls on his interviews. He felt Isaacs might have slanted his findings in favor of the irrational rather than rational images. [3]

The book proved to have staying power, however. In ???, Press brought out a paperback edition under the title, and over the next ?? years, with new prefaces by the author.

Steven W. Mosher, for instance, adopted its time frame from

References

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  • Israel, Jerry (2001). "Scratches on Our Minds Revisited: Chinese Influences on the Shaping of American Images". Chinese Studies in History. 34 (3): 5–9. doi:10.2753/CSH0009-463334035. S2CID 143810953.
  • Isaacs, Harold Robert (1958). Scratches on Our Minds: American Views of China and India. New York: John Day. ISBN 0873321618.. Internet Archive here.
  • Lieberman, Henry R. (13 April 1958), "A Case of Poor Orientation", New York Times: 136
  • Rotter, Andrew J. (1996). "In Retrospect: Harold R. Isaacs's Scratches on Our Minds". Reviews in American History. 24: 177–188. doi:10.1353/rah.1996.0027. S2CID 144015421.

Notes

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  1. ^ Jeffrey N. Wasserstrom, “Dreams and Nightmares: History and U.S. Visions of the Beijing Games.” in Owning the Olympics: Narratives of the New China, edited by Monroe E. Price and Daniel Dayan (University of Michigan Press, 2008), pp. 163–84, https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctv65sw9q.9.
  2. ^ Lieberman (1958).
  3. ^ Ashmead, John (1958), "Review", Journal of Asian Studies, 18 (1): 117, doi:10.2307/2941291, JSTOR 2941291, S2CID 162644493
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