The book consists of excerpts from interviews of senior members of State College Friends Meeting. The narrators who lived through the Great Depression tell of their difficult childhoodand yet in most cases one they regarded as happy. Some of the conscientious objectors during WWII tell of life in CPS camps; others speak of using nonviolent methods with mental patients, while still others relate the story of the human guinea experiments some of them participated in. Of those who did relief work after the war overseas, probably the most exciting tales are told by the four who worked with the Friends Ambulance Unit in China. They happened to be located close to where the Nationalists and the Communists were fighting.

The book consists of excerpts from interviews of senior members of State College Friends Meeting. The narrators who lived through the Great Depression tell of their difficult childhood--and yet in most cases one they regarded as happy. Some of the conscientious objectors during WWII tell of life in CPS camps; others speak of using nonviolent methods with mental patients, while still others relate the story of the human guinea experiments some of them participated in. Of those who did relief work after the war overseas, probably the most exciting tales are told by the four who worked with the Friends Ambulance Unit in China. They happened to be located close to where the Nationalists and the Communists were fighting.

The Sino-Japanese War (1937–45) had a devastating impact on China’s population. Braving bandits and disease, the China Convoy – a Quaker-sponsored humanitarian unit – provided medical relief in the unoccupied territory of “Free China” and later to both sides in the ensuing civil war. China Gadabouts examines the roles played by Western and Chinese nurses in the Convoy’s humanitarian efforts from 1941 to 1951. In so doing, it re-examines the quandaries of Quakers’ purportedly apolitical global engagement that remain salient for contemporary humanitarians. China Gadabouts illuminates the dilemmas, challenges, and opportunities presented by humanitarian work within a Western-based relief organization.

This fascinating book is the first volume in a projected cultural history of the United States, from the earliest English settlements to our own time. It is a history of American folkways as they have changed through time, and it argues a thesis about the importance for the United States of having been British in its cultural origins. While most people in the United States today have no British ancestors, they have assimilated regional cultures which were created by British colonists, even while preserving ethnic identities at the same time. In this sense, nearly all Americans are "Albion's Seed," no matter what their ethnicity may be. The concluding section of this remarkable book explores the ways that regional cultures have continued to dominate national politics from 1789 to 1988, and still help to shape attitudes toward education, government, gender, and violence, on which differences between American regions are greater than between European nations.