China Gadabouts

China Gadabouts
Author: Susan Armstrong-Reid
Publisher: UBC Press
Total Pages: 356
Release: 2017-12-01
Genre: Medical
ISBN: 0774835958

The Sino-Japanese War (1937–45) had a devastating impact on China’s civilian population. Braving bandits, disease, and dangerous roads, the China Convoy – a Quaker-sponsored humanitarian unit – delivered medical supplies and provided famine relief in the unoccupied territory of “Free China” and later to both sides in the ensuing civil war. China Gadabouts examines the contested 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. Susan Armstrong-Reid explores how this work gave meaning to the women’s lives and how they attempted to carve out personal and professional space despite a chaotic, unfamiliar, and occasionally hostile environment. China Gadabouts illuminates the ethical dilemmas, professional challenges, and opportunities presented by humanitarian nursing within a Western-based relief organization, while acknowledging its contentious imperial role. In doing so, it spotlights an understudied area of global nursing – its role within INGOs, now more active than ever in global health care.

China Gadabouts

China Gadabouts
Author: Susan Armstrong-Reid
Publisher: UBC Press
Total Pages: 356
Release: 2017-12-01
Genre: Medical
ISBN: 9780774835947

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.

Nursing Shifts in Sichuan

Nursing Shifts in Sichuan
Author: Sonya Grypma
Publisher: UBC Press
Total Pages: 416
Release: 2021-12-01
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0774865741

Nursing Shifts in Sichuan illuminates one of the most consequential additions to early-twentieth-century health care in China. In 1943, the Peking Union Medical College (PUMC) was forced to evacuate to the Canadian West China Mission in Chengdu, Sichuan. As part of an extraordinary mass migration to Free China during the Japanese occupation, the refugee PUMC was hosted by the Canadian West China Mission for the next three years. During that period, the PUMC transformed nursing at the Canadian mission, initiating the second university nursing program in the country. Both programs were closed by the new Communist government in 1951. When China reopened degree programs thirty-five years later, it was PUMC alumnae who helped restart them. In the contemporary era of exponential increases in East–West educational exchanges, Nursing Shifts in Sichuan offers both a cautionary tale about the fragility of transnational relations and a testament to the resilience of educated women.

Colonial caring

Colonial caring
Author: Helen Sweet
Publisher: Manchester University Press
Total Pages: 309
Release: 2015-09-01
Genre: History
ISBN: 1526100010

This electronic version has been made available under a Creative Commons (BY-NC-ND) open access license. From the height of colonialism in the mid-nineteenth century, through to the aftermath of the Second World War, nurses have been at the heart of colonial projects. They were ideally placed to insinuate the ‘improving’ culture of their employers into the local communities they served, and travelled in droves to far-flung parts of the globe to serve their country. Issues of gender, class and race permeate this book, as the complex relationships between nurses, their medical colleagues, governments and the populations they nursed are examined in detail, using case studies which draw on exciting new sources. Many of the chapters are based on first-hand accounts of nurses and reveal that not all were motivated by patriotic vigour or altruism, but went out in search of adventure. The book will be an essential read for colonial historians, as well as historians of gender and ethnicity.

The Quaker World

The Quaker World
Author: C. Wess Daniels
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 631
Release: 2022-11-04
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 0429632355

The Quaker World is an outstanding, comprehensive and lively introduction to this complex Christian denomination. Exploring the global reach of the Quaker community, the book begins with a discussion of the living community, as it is now, in all its diversity and complexity. The book covers well-known areas of Quaker development, such as the formation of Liberal Quakerism in North America, alongside topics which have received much less scholarly attention in the past, such as the history of Quakers in Bolivia and the spread of Quakerism in Western Kenya. It includes over sixty chapters by a distinguished international and interdisciplinary team of contributors and is organised into three clear parts: Global Quakerism Spirituality Embodiment Within these sections, key themes are examined, including global Quaker activity, significant Quaker movements, biographies of key religious figures, important organisations, pacifism, politics, the abolition of slavery, education, industry, human rights, racism, refugees, gender, disability, sexuality and environmentalism. The Quaker World provides an authoritative and accessible source of information on all topics important to Quaker Studies. As such, it is essential reading for students studying world religions, Christianity and comparative religion, and it will also be of interest to those in related fields such as sociology, political science, anthropology and ethics.

Uniting Nations

Uniting Nations
Author: Daniel Gorman
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 297
Release: 2022-07-28
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1009081209

Uniting Nations is a comparative study of Britons who worked in the United Nations and international non-governmental and civil society organizations from 1945 to 1970 and their role in forging the postwar international system. Daniel Gorman interweaves the personal histories of scores of individuals who worked in UN organizations, the world government movement, Quaker international volunteer societies, and colonial freedom societies to demonstrate how international public policy often emerged 'from the ground up.' He reveals the importance of interwar, Second World War, colonial, and voluntary experiences in inspiring international careers, how international and national identities intermingled in the minds of international civil servants and civil society activists, and the ways in which international policy is personal. It is in the personal relationships forged by international civil servants and activists, positive and negative, biased and altruistic, short-sighted or visionary, that the “international” is to be found in the postwar international order.

The Politics of Service

The Politics of Service
Author: Daniel Maul
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
Total Pages: 344
Release: 2024-07-22
Genre: History
ISBN: 311067579X

This book provides the first comprehensive history of the American Friends Service Committee (AFSC), the central aid agency of the Religious Society of Friends or Quakers, from 1917 to 1945. Implying a thoroughly transnational approach, it sheds a light on the important role American Quakers played in the emergence of a humanitarian sector both within the USA and beyond. Through the Quaker lens the book adresses important tensions inherent to the history of humanitarianism in the 20th century: Following the AFSCs aid operations from the First World War, through post-war Germany and Soviet Russia to the Spanish Civil War and into the Second World War, it deals with the AFSC’s conflicting roles as a specifically American aid organization on the one hand and its position within transnational religious and pacifist networks on the other and it opens a window to processes of professionalization, the development of a humanitarian “market place” and the complex relationship of religious and secular strands in the history of international relief.

Historical Dictionary of World War II

Historical Dictionary of World War II
Author: Anne Sharp Wells
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
Total Pages: 521
Release: 2023-12-15
Genre: History
ISBN: 1538102560

World War II was the largest and most costly conflict in history, the first true global war. Fought on land, on sea, and in the air, it involved numerous countries and killed, maimed, or displaced millions of people, both civilian and military, around the world. In spite of the alliances that bound many of the same participants, the war was essentially two separate but simultaneous conflicts: one involved Japan as the major antagonist and took place mostly in Asia and the Pacific; and the other, initiated by Germany and Italy, was contested mainly in Europe, North Africa, the Mediterranean, and the Atlantic. This book focuses on the lesser known war, the war with Japan. It begins with Japan’s seizure of Manchuria from China in 1931 and covers Japan’s ambitious attacks on Pearl Harbor and other territories ten years later, the use of atomic bombs on Japan’s cities, and the end of the Allied occupation of Japan in 1952. Although Japan renounced war in its 1947 constitution, conflict continued across Asia, as former colonies fought for independence and civil war engulfed other areas. Historical Dictionary of World War II: The War Against Japan, Second Edition contains a chronology, an introduction, and an extensive bibliography. The dictionary section has more than 500 cross-referenced entries on the military, diplomatic, political, social, economic, and scientific aspects of the war, in addition to the lives of the people who participated in and directed the war. This book is an excellent resource for students, researchers, and anyone wanting to know more about the war against Japan during World War II.

Beyond Nightingale

Beyond Nightingale
Author: Carol Helmstadter
Publisher: Manchester University Press
Total Pages: 385
Release: 2019-11-11
Genre: History
ISBN: 1526140535

This book studies Crimean War nursing from a transnational perspective setting nursing in the five combatant armies into the wider context of European statecraft.

Battles of Conscience

Battles of Conscience
Author: Tobias Kelly
Publisher: Random House
Total Pages: 307
Release: 2022-05-05
Genre: History
ISBN: 1473581834

A ground-breaking new study brings us a very different picture of the Second World War, asking fundamental questions about ethical commitments Accounts of the Second World War usually involve tales of bravery in battle, or stoicism on the home front, as the British public stood together against Fascism. However, the war looks very different when seen through the eyes of the 60,000 conscientious objectors who refused to take up arms and whose stories, unlike those of the First World War, have been almost entirely forgotten. Tobias Kelly invites us to spend the war five of these individuals: Roy Ridgway, a factory clerk from Liverpool; Tom Burns, a teacher from east London; Stella St John, who trained as a vet and ended up in jail; Ronald Duncan, who set up a collective farm; and Fred Urquhart, a working-class Scottish socialist and writer. We meet many more objectors along the way -- people both determined and torn -- and travel from Finland to Syria, India to rural England, Edinburgh to Trinidad. Although conscientious objectors were often criticised and scorned, figures such as Winston Churchill and the Archbishop of Canterbury supported their right to object, at least in principle, suggesting that liberty of conscience was one of the freedoms the nation was fighting for. And their rich cultural and moral legacy -- of humanitarianism and human rights, from Amnesty International and Oxfam to the US civil rights movement -- can still be felt all around us. The personal and political struggles carefully and vividly collected in this book tell us a great deal about personal and collective freedom, conviction and faith, war and peace, and pose questions just as relevant today: Does conscience make us free? Where does it take us? And what are the costs of going there? '[An] excellent book' - DAILY TELEGRAPH 'A moving tribute' - SPECTATOR