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2 books match the query '1937 1939'

cover of Good-Bye to Old Peking: The Wartime Letters Of U.S. Marine Captain John Seymour Letcher, 1937-1939

Good-Bye to Old Peking

The Wartime Letters Of U.S. Marine Captain John Seymour Letcher, 1937-1939

John Seymour Letcher

Ohio University Press, 1998

For two and a half years (1937-1939), Captain John Seymour Letcher commanded a company of the U.S. Embassy Marine Guard in Peking. During that time, he wrote a series of letters to his parents in Virginia describing the life of a Westerner in the former imperial city. During that same time, China was invaded by Japan.

Captain Letcher describes the flavor of life in pre-Communist China — the food, servants, cold Peking winters and torrid summers, hunting, and excursions to the major tourist sites.

But his letters also tell of the Japanese slaughter of Chinese troops in the opening days of the Sino-Japanese War. He wrote about life in a city under Japanese occupation and the stirring story of the Chinese guerrillas rebounding from devastating defeat.

These letters and accompanying introduction, preface, and notes, draw attention to the Western experience in a place and time largely overlooked by military historians and modern China specialists.
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cover of Teaching in Wartime China: A Photo-Memoir, 1937-1939

Teaching in Wartime China

A Photo-Memoir, 1937-1939

Edward Gulick

University of Massachusetts Press, 1995

After graduating from Yale in 1937, Edward Gulick spent two years in China’s Hunan Province, teaching English at a mission school for Chinese boys. Faced with the prospect of invasion and military occupation by the Japanese, the school’s leaders moved the students to safer quarters in a distant town. Gulick participated in the evacuation, traveled widely in the area, and kept detailed journals of his experiences. Drawing on these journals and on a collection of remarkable photographs he took at the time, he has created a memoir in words and images that vividly conveys the texture of daily life during his sojourn in China. Gulick is a keen observer and his narrative successfully interweaves two voices: that of the earnest young man who found himself caught up in the turbulence of central China on the eve of World War II, and that of the historian who pondered the experience for many years while teaching the history of China and Japan at Wellesley College.

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