"Although Southern Illinois University in many ways may be a typical large public university, its unique location, history, and culture make it a distinct institution of higher education. This book is designed to celebrate the 150th anniversary of the university's founding by documenting its history and development from 1969 to 2019"--

Tracing China’s journey began from exploring rural revolution and reconstitutions of community in South China. Spanning decades of rural-urban divide, it finally uncovers China’s global reach and Hong Kong’s cross-border dynamics. Helen Siu traverses physical and cultural landscapes to examine political tumults transforming into everyday lives, and fathom the depths of human drama amid China’s frenetic momentum toward modernity. Highlighting complicity, Siu portrays how villagers, urbanites, cadres, entrepreneurs, and intellectuals—laden with historical baggage—venture forward. But have they victimized themselves in the process? This essay collection, informed by critical social theories and shaped by careful scrutiny of fieldwork and archival texts, is woven by key historical/anthropological themes—culture, history, power, place-making, and identity formation. Siu stresses process and contingency and argues that culture and society are constructed through human actions with nuanced meanings, moral imagination, and contested interests. Challenging the notion that social/political changes are mere linear historical progressions, she traces layers of the past in present realities. “Helen Siu is one of the world’s leading specialists on Chinese rural and urban society. Her essays, collected here, cover a wide range of topics of interest to anthropologists, sociologists, geographers, economists, and political scientists. Siu focuses on the ‘underside’ of social life in South China, a quality so often missing in the work of others. She writes with great skill and empathy.” —James L. Watson, Fairbank Professor of Chinese Society and Professor of Anthropology, Emeritus, Harvard University “No one has woven the threads of ethnography, social structure, and cultural performance so brilliantly together as Helen Siu has in Tracing China. This rich tapestry of her finest scholarship illuminates how culture, power, and history can be deployed to yield wholly original and convincing understandings of southern China.” —James C. Scott, Sterling Professor of Political Science and Anthropology, Yale University

This is the story about the struggles of a girl who went through the Japanese war, loved and adored by her father and was devastated when he died when she was in her early teen. Its a story of her struggle to live a normal family life. She lived in an age where match making for marriage was an accepted practice. Being brought up in a traditional Asian family where girls were taught to observe filial piety, she obediently had to accept whoever she was being match made to, without seeing the potential groom in many cases. Her constant desire to leave the place she used to call home when her mother turned it into a den of wantoness. How was she going to get out of this place where she had fond memories of life with father? This home cannot be called home anymore.

When Morris became president in 1948, enrollment at SIU was 3,013. By the end of his career, enrollment on the two campuses totaled nearly 35,000. He instituted Ph.D. programs and created family housing. He lobbied for and got the TV station, the FM radio station, the university press, the news service, and outdoor education. Long before it was fashionable he promoted ecology, just as he provided facilities for the handicapped years before society demanded them. He brought to the school such luminaries as R. Buckminster Fuller. Through it all he demanded that SIU be an integral part of the southern Illinois community.