A Day in the Life: A Chinese Peasant During the Cultural Revolution Adam Coldren
The life of a Chinese peasant during the Cultural Revolution imposed by Chairman Mao was one fraught with struggle and suffering. One of the best chronicles of this struggle is the novel To Live. The story follows a man named Fugui, who was born into a rich household and enjoyed wasting money at brothels and on gambling, through which he eventually managed to lose his family’s house and property to a landlord named Long Er. Following this loss, Fugui was forced to rent land from Long Er and become a farmer to sustain his wife, daughter, and mother. Fugui did not even know how to farm the land he rented, but “learned from watching the other farmers.” Even his mother was forced to help him farm the land, because he was so unskilled that it took him far too long to do the work himself.
Cheap Amusements: Working Women and Leisure in Turn-of-the-Century New York. Kathy Peiss. A review Chad Warner
The central theme in Kathy Peiss’s Cheap Amusements: Working Women and Leisure in Turn-of-the-Century New York, work and leisure opportunities were open to women in the nineteenth century New York, leading to a new beginning in American culture. Driven by women, the movement was toward autonomy, assertion, respectability, expressiveness, romance, and sexual experimentation, tensions amongst the classes pose opposition to the leisure of the working class, and through this push, a new culture emerged and the entire face of American society would be forever changed.
The Cave 