The Limits of Westernization: American and East Asian Intellectuals Create Modernity, 1860 1960 [Hardcover]

Preface; Acknowledgements; Introduction: Historical Writing and the Limits of Westernization; 1: Early East Asian Pioneers of Modernity, 1860-1910;2: The Development of Modernity in American Thought, 1890s-1910s;3: John Deweys Trip to China, Hu Shih, Lu Xun, and Chinese Modernity, 1919-1920;4: American and Japanese Internationalism and Modernity in the 1920s;5: Modernity in Crisis, 1930s-1940s;6: The Postwar Transformation; Afterward; Bibliography; Index

The goal of this project is to locate the origins and development of modern thought in the United States and East Asia in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. While a strong literature on post-war modernization exists, there is a gap in the pre-war origins and development of modern ideas. This book re-evaluates the influence of the United States on East Asia in the twentieth century and gives greater voice to East Asians in the construction of their own ideas of modernity.

Jon Thares Davidann is Professor of History, Hawaii Pacific University.

The book is a seminal work that recalibrates an established narrative of modernity, the West as teacher and the East as pupil.  Prof. Dr. Andreas Niehaus, Head Department Languages and Cultures, Ghent University

Jon Thares Davidann forces a course correction in modernity studies with his insightful new book showing how from roughly 1860 to 1950 intellectuals from Japan, China, the United States, and Korea contributed to a hybrid form of modernization in East Asia with indigenous roots. - James I. Matray, Califl£”