This essay was inspired by Craig A. Lockard’s “Crossing Borders: Disciplines, Cultures, and Histories.” It reflects how the author’s perspective has changed over a career of university teaching and research in Chinese, Asian, and world history. It describes a comparative approach to the study and teaching of global history.

I am honored to be invited to comment on Craig Lockhard’s essay reflecting on his long and distinguished teaching career. He is one of the leading world historians whose work I most admire. Because I both agree with him, and wish to second what he has to say about the need for Americans to better understand the world in which we live, my comments will neither criticize nor challenge what he has written. Instead, I will try to suggest how my own experience over the same four decades led me to similar views through a somewhat different process. Where Lockard speaks of crossing the borders of disciplines and cultures, I like to talk about coming to see comparison as a device for challenging assumptions and asking questions. Toward the end, I will offer some reflections on global history, globalization, and where I think we are now.
 
While I have met Craig Lockard once or twice at conferences, I know him best through his published work and as a stalwart of the World History Association to which I also belong. What I know about his career is what he reveals in his essay. It appears that our lives have followed somewhat parallel trajectories. We both grew up in California, he in Pasadena; I, a world away (or so I thought) in the Bay Area. He mentions thoughts of being a beach bum; I had aspirations as a water polo player. He was trained in Southeast Asian history; I studied East Asia and China. He spent a career teaching in Wisconsin, I am in my 43rd, and last, year at the University of Minnesota. While these similarities are striking, I should also note some of the differences.

SELF-DISCOVERY

 
Looking back over the trajectory of my life I think I see two elements, both very personal, that led me eventually in the direction of world history. One grew from the fact that I was the youngest child in my family and in the neighborhood where I grew up. This circumstance introduced me, in my earliest years, to the problem of relative power. Being at the bottom of the pecking order, I developed a strong interest in fairness and the enforcement of the rules, and subsequently to a lifelong identification with the underdog and a penchant for trying to imagine another person’s situation. Another, perhaps related, trait was an interest in different ways of life, what we now term the Other. This matured when I was in high school and developed a strong curiosity about world affairs I followed by reading Time magazine. Beyond the international rivalry of the Cold War, my curiosity about other countries and other realities was nurtured at the Guild Theater in Menlo Park, a movie house that specialized in showing foreign films. I went frequently to be transported beyond the conformist confines of 1950s California. The work of Jean Cocteau and Ingmar Bergman, in particular, opened my eyes. After my freshman year in college I spent a summer traveling in Western Europe with a high school classmate who was half French and had many relatives we could visit.

When I entered college at Stanford I still had no interest in China or Asia, nor any thoughts about studying history. Unlike Professor Lockard, I was not smitten with the Chinese paintings in the art gallery. And unlike Professor Lockard, I was too shy to even imagine studying abroad in Austria or Hong Kong as he did. I liked gardening and biology and planned to become a botanist. Despite these interests I was not cut out to be a scientist. When students ask how I got interested in Chinese history I tell them it was through organic chemistry. Two years of chemistry labs thoroughly soured any interest I had in the biological sciences. In my sophomore year I decided to shop around for a new major, one that would allow me to take many electives and search for a new direction. A required freshman course in Western Civilization had sparked my interest in ideas, if not in history as a discipline.  But a history major had minimal requirements and offered me the flexibility I needed to explore new possibilities. At first I was assigned an advisor who was a specialist in American history. This was not a promising beginning. When I visited his office I saw on his desk a recently completed article on American jazz. Again unlike Lockard, I had no aptitude for music and thought that it was an utterly frivolous topic. Besides, I had no interest in studying my own society. This is where the experience with organic chemistry came to my aid. I thought I could approach history like the periodic table – placing societies in rows according to their characteristics and then survey them with an eye to comparison and classification. With this idea as a starting point, I opened the course catalog and looked for something on the other side of the world. A course on modern China was offered, and I enrolled. It was my good fortune that the course was taught by Arthur F. Wright, an able scholar and an engaging teacher. I was particularly taken by his description of modern China’s crisis of identity brought to a head by a cataclysmic confrontation with Western imperialism in the nineteenth century.
 
The discovery of Chinese history derailed my plan for a systematic tour of the globe in favor of taking any courses I could find about China or Asia. Eventually I settled into a joint major in History and Philosophy with the thought of pursuing Chinese intellectual history. I wrote junior and senior level seminar papers on Sun Yat-sen and Tan Sitong, heroes of the Chinese search for a new national identity. Unable to read Chinese, I was dependent upon translations into English. Draft copies of the Sources of Chinese Tradition, then in preparation at Columbia University, were especially helpful in giving me insights into the richness of the Chinese thought.  I was rather far along in my undergraduate career when China captured my interest and so I avoided studying the language at Stanford. The word was that the instructor was Cantonese and that one might get a distorted version of Mandarin, but the real reason was that I had little confidence in my ability to succeed in what was thought to be a very difficult language. In addition to my linguistic handicap (Scientific German proved to be of limited utility in the approach to modern China) I was woefully ignorant of other disciplines that might have been useful. I never took a course in political science, economics, sociology, or anthropology, just to name the most obvious ones. I did wonder, from time to time, why some of the books I was most anxious to read were in the reading room of the Political Science Department.

Military service provided the route to Chinese language study. (If only space and time permitted I could add many additional comments to what Professor Lockard says about the importance of the military services in developing American expertise in foreign languages and area studies.) When I finished college in 1957 males were still expected to perform military service and could anticipate receiving draft notices when they finished school. I took a proactive approach to this issue and enlisted in the regular army after my twenty-second birthday. My goal was to go to the Army Language School in Monterey, California, which offered the most intensive instruction available anywhere, using all native speakers drilling classes of no more than six or seven students six hours a day, five days a week. To get into to the language school I had to first go through basic training and advanced individual training in a unit that had a quota for the language school. This also meant that after completing eighteen months of language training at Monterey I had to perform two years of service in my unit, a counter-intelligence organization. This service took me to South Korea for a year and provided me with richly rewarding, for a future historian, experiences in observing the overthrow of the Syngman Rhee government, and my first glimpses of Asia during brief visits to Japan, Taiwan, the Philippines and Hong Kong. My military service lasted more than four years, longer than I had been in college and, for that matter, longer than the United States had engaged in the Second World War. It was priceless experience and it confirmed my determination to pursue Chinese studies in graduate school.

IN SEARCH OF THE OTHER

From the army I went directly to graduate school. Here again, government action was crucial. In the summer of 1961 the Berlin Wall went up and many of my colleagues were sent to Germany in response to the crisis. I was a likely candidate for shipment overseas since my earlier study of German was on my record. However, because I had already been admitted to graduate school, I was allowed to leave the army a few weeks early to enroll for the fall term. I was able to go to Harvard only because the Congress, in response to the Russian launch of the satellite called Sputnik, had passed the National Defense Education Act (NDEA) that provided money for graduate training in foreign languages and associated studies. A National Defense Foreign Language (NDFL) fellowship supported me through four years of graduate classes. This program, one of the most enlightened acts of national self-interest the federal government has undertaken, was responsible for training many of the faculty who have done research and taught about foreign areas over the last half century. The descendants of NDEA and NDFL today come under Title VI of the Higher Education Act; I am currently the director of a National Resource Center (NRC) and a Foreign Language and Area Studies (FLAS) fellowship program that carry on this work.
 
At Harvard I got an MA in a program, in Regional Studies – East Asia, which consisted of language and area studies courses concentrated on China and Japan. At the Ph.D. level, I entered a program called History and Far Eastern Languages. This program was created to spare us from the requirements of the History Department and give us credit for the extensive amount of language training that was required of us: a reading knowledge of French or German (but not both as the History Department demanded), modern Japanese, modern Chinese, and Classical Chinese. Despite the presence of “History” in the title of the program I had very little formal training as a historian and did no formal coursework in associated social sciences. Unlike Professor Lockard’s experience at Wisconsin where faculty and graduate students participated in a curriculum that included Southeast Asian history and Comparative World History, at Harvard we were pretty much left to sink or swim on our own with scant direction or advice from the faculty who were desperately trying to get their own research to publication. The overview of East Asia as a region was encapsulated in a dazzling new textbook co-authored by John King Fairbank and Edwin O. Reischauer, the leading Chinese and Japanese historians on the Harvard Faculty.  It was a rich survey of the development of a unique and powerful civilization followed by a somewhat more detailed account of how local institutions came under challenge by modernization and the intrusion of the Western powers. The two volumes were structured around the notions of a “great tradition” and its “modern transformation,” reflecting some of the academic concepts current at that time. East Asia was home to one of the world’s greatest civilizations and currently two of its most dynamic modern nations: Japan an economic dynamo, and China, site of the world’s greatest revolution. With effort one could learn about all of this and even begin to understand some of the dynamics.
 
Graduate seminars were devoted to learning how to find, read and use source materials in the relevant archives. Professor Fairbank’s great contribution to this process was to demystify Chinese documents and teach American students how to read them. We were taught the mechanics and left to our own devices in terms of finding topics and writing dissertations. I was not attracted by the kind of East-West diplomatic history that Fairbank had pioneered; I wanted to pursue my inquiry into what I thought of as China’s modern identity crisis. Following the end of the imperial system in 1911, Sun Yat-sen and his countrymen had set out to define and create a new Chinese nation in the wake of two and one half centuries of Manchu rule (Qing Dynasty 1644-1911). I started where I had left off as an undergraduate, with the intellectual ferment of the early twentieth century, planning to write about Feng Youlan, China’s most prominent philosopher.  When I learned that someone at Columbia was already planning to write about Feng, I made a strategic decision to push my project back in time. I decided to study the founding of the Ming Dynasty (1368-1644), the last native Chinese ruling house that had held sway after the era of Mongol rule and before the Manchu conquest. This decision, taken in crisis, has paid great dividends over the years. The U.S. government again came to my aid, supporting two years of language study and research in Taiwan on a Fulbright Fellowship. I had now made the transition from the Defense Department, via the Department of Education, to the State Department. Two years in Taiwan (Americans could not visit mainland China between 1949 and 1971) was my longest and most rewarding residence in Asia. Again, I would like to underscore the importance of the Fulbright program in connecting American academia, students and teachers, with other countries and cultures. The impact of Fulbright initiatives over half a century is incalculable.
 
The dissertation I wrote was not in the field of intellectual history but concerned the geo-political movement of the capital from Nanjing in central China to Beijing on the northern frontier. I became a specialist in the growing subfield of Ming history, started Ming Studies, a journal for other specialists, became editor of a Ming Studies Research Series, and was elected  the first president of the Society for Ming Studies. Last year I was appointed as a visiting member of the Ming Section of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences.  All this is to say that my search for the Other led to early modern China. I went on the job market as a Chinese historian and wound up at the University of Minnesota where I participated in teaching a general survey course on East Asia, a series of upper division courses on modern China, and a graduate research seminar on late imperial Chinese history. In short, I was an East Asian area specialist, trained and hired to reproduce the kind of specialized training I had received in graduate school.

FROM AREA STUDIES TO  COMPARATIVE HISTORY

The institutional environment I encountered at Minnesota was vastly different from the one Craig Lockard experienced at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and the “innovative interdisciplinary curriculum” and “problem-centered departments with faculty drawn from several disciplines” that he describes at the University of Wisconsin-Green Bay. My institutional home, The College of Liberal Arts at the University of Minnesota, was organized along the lines of disciplinary departments; it had no tradition of area studies (although there was a rich range of offerings on Scandinavia) and few arrangements for interdisciplinary collaboration by faculty. I spent more than thirty years struggling against these arrangements with scant success. I will return to this topic below.
 
The history department I joined was a conservative, all-white, all-male organization divided into European and American “wings” which managed their own curriculum, graduate training and hiring. The Europeanists were more conservative, both intellectually and socially; the Americanists more liberal. The rest of us – specialists in Latin American, African, and Asian history – were referred to as the “feathers;” our numbers and influence did not suffice to form a coherent wing. We were tolerated as members of exotic species and often spoken of, and to, using stereotyped language, e.g., “inscrutable Orientals.” Not only was I studying the radical Other; I was jokingly referred to by my colleagues as a radical Other.  It probably did not help that I was the faculty sponsor of a chapter of the Committee of Concerned Asian Scholars (CCAS) at the height of protests against the Vietnam War.
 
Strange to say, it was in this Eurocentric History Department that I escaped the parochialism of my own training in East Asian Studies. When I arrived in Minneapolis in 1968 I joined three other Asian historians in the department: one each in South Asian, Chinese, and Japanese history. My South Asian colleague, David Kopf, suggested that we merge our introductory courses and approach the subject matter comparatively, instead of offering three separate surveys of India, China and Japan. Kopf had been trained at the University of Chicago and was stimulated by the recent publication of William McNeill’s book The Rise of the West.  In that work McNeill began with an overview of the great Eurasian civilizations developing in parallel up to the modern period when the West became ascendant. Wishing to do justice to Asian history, and to counter assumptions of Western superiority, we took our cue from the first part of McNeill’s work. The result was a three-quarter-long course comparing the histories of three great civilizations: Middle Eastern, South Asian and East Asian and two zones of interaction, Central Asia and Southeast Asia, from earliest times to the present. Europe, the fourth Eurasian civilization, was implicit in the comparison but left out for practical reasons. The comparison was structured according to the “Three Ps” – Period, Process, and Pattern. The story unfolded through chronological periods in which we took up various topics such as the birth of civilization, universal empires, and world religions, down to Western European domination and the emergence of nationalism. For each topic we wrote an introductory section that discussed “processes” common to that topic. For this purpose we rummaged widely through the literature of the social sciences, cavalierly borrowing concepts and vocabulary wherever they suited our needs, and arguing for months to find formulations that would work for each of our areas. The third P was pattern, an application of the more abstract process to the particularities of each region being compared. It was an enormously stimulating, and demanding, process of discussion and consensus building that after six years produced a two-volume textbook.
 
More important than the textbook, which came out just as the Vietnam War ended and student interest in Asia declined, was the shift this process brought about in my view of history. Not only did I learn about many times and places that were new to me, I came to see that everything I had previously learned about China and East Asia could meaningfully be viewed comparatively and placed alongside similar phenomena in other parts of the world. I was transformed from an area specialist into a comparativist.
 
Another step away from parochialism came, surprisingly, from the European wing of my department. James Tracy, a specialist on Erasmus and Dutch history, proposed that those of us in the department, and a handful of others from different disciplines, with interests in the early modern period should come together to form a program that would transcend our regional specializations. The result was the formation, inside the History Department, of the Center for Early Modern History.  Thanks to a small endowment the Center was able to invite visiting scholars, mount major research conferences, offer a seminar and support a graduate field, and now a graduate minor, in comparative early modern history.  We defined the early modern period as roughly 1350-1750, from the end of the Mongol world empire to the beginning of the Industrial Revolution. We agreed to take up topics that were either interactive or comparative on as broad a scale as our resources would allow. The early modern initiative, innovative in the 1980s, anticipated a trend away from parochial and national history to much more open inquiry that has since become widespread in the historical profession.

It remains to say something about my institutional struggles. For three decades I tried by various means to promote area studies to no avail. This included creating an East Asian Studies major, chairing an East Asian Studies Department, participating in a regional Midwest China Center, organizing an East Asian Studies MA program, and even merging a group of area studies major programs within an Institute of International Studies. By the 1990s all of them, the Center, the Department, and the undergraduate programs were gone. A summer intensive language program was established in China in 1980 but it was abandoned by the turn of the century. The MA program limped along for a few more years without support and was terminated in this decade. Four summers I took students to China under two different programs but neither initiative has survived. I can take some credit for transforming the Institute into a new Institute for Global Studies but this was created without a core faculty; it serves as an administrative home for a popular undergraduate major and a collection of programs that fall outside of the departmental structure of the college. My greatest success in broadening undergraduate education at Minnesota came in the 1980s when I proposed a change to the college distribution requirements that obliged all undergraduates to take two courses, in any discipline, about non-Western societies or cultures. For almost a decade this caused a gratifying spurt of enrollments in courses about all corners of the world beyond the NATO countries. Distribution requirements, however, are as much about competition for student credit hours as they are about changing students’ understanding of the world. In the next revision of distribution requirements my non-Western culture requirement was replaced by one that specified “international content,” in a way that put more emphasis on national governments than culture and values. I have concluded from all of these experiences that the culture of an ESU (enormous state university) can be very difficult to change. I would describe the University of Minnesota culture as one that views expertise as an export commodity. Consequently, we have more than a thousand Chinese student and scholars on our campus, and two of our professional schools offer degrees in China but there is no comparable institutional support for getting American students to China for sustained study.

FROM ASIAN TO WORLD HISTORY

Again, the most lasting move to expand the curriculum beyond our borders came in the History Department. In 1981 I proposed to my colleagues that we limit our introductory offerings to three survey courses: U.S. History – which already existed – and World History and Western Civilizations, neither of which existed. More specialized surveys, of which we had a dozen or more, would be pushed to the upper division. This idea won acceptance and a group of us spent a year designing a three-quarter overview of world history.  Initially, I thought that the Period/Process/Pattern structure that had worked so well before could be modified for world history use but I soon realized that this was unrealistic. World history is vastly more diverse and other solutions were required. We came up with a case study approach, designed to sample three or four areas of the world, without attempting a comprehensive survey. The three parts of the course were assigned differing lengths of time – 5,000 years, 500 years, and 50 years – giving more intensive treatment to the recent past than to the remote past. The themes of livelihood and identity allowed us to talk about both material history and subjective identity issues for any people anywhere and freed us from ties to elites or particular sectors of society.  My idea was to stress those topics in the past that still have the most impact on our present. So in the first section, on the long duration of agricultural history, empires and world religions were featured. In the second, the modern energy era, industrialization and nationalism were obvious topics. In the last fifty years, which I think of as the information age, I chose to emphasize human rights and ecology. When our university changed from the quarter system to the semester system in 2000 we divided the course so that the first two parts became a year-long sequence in World History and the third part a single-semester Global History course, cross-listed between History and the Global Studies Program. The courses have been popular and outdraw the Western Civilizations sequence, but not U.S. history.

I have taught in all three parts of our sequence, usually with another faculty member, but in the last fifteen years I have stuck to the last section, the Information age. In 2007 I published a combined text and reader designed just for this course.  The way I do it, the course is divided into three parts, each with a paper and an exam. The aim is to get students to grasp some of the realities of other parts of the world and to learn how to ask questions and think comparatively about places and people that are not necessarily directly connected. Films, autobiographies, fiction, and other documents are used to provide vicarious experience of other times and places. I emphasize cases from Africa, Asia and Latin America, in part because our other introductory survey courses are centered on Europe and the United States.  In each of the three regions, I focus on a pair of countries, one socialist, one capitalist. The cases I use currently are China and Taiwan in Asia, South Africa and Mozambique in Africa, and Cuba and Guatemala in Latin America. The first third of the course looks at the world through the East-West division of the Cold War. The topic is human rights: students are asked to see how elements of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights were differently enforced in capitalist and socialist societies. The second part looks at the North-South division of the world: it focuses on the conditions of labor in socialist and capitalist systems and the movement of labor and jobs across borders in the integrating world economy, both during and after the Cold War. The last third of the course considers the plight of a swollen human population in the post-Cold War era when all are at the mercy of a global market system without sufficient guidance, safeguards or regulatory mechanisms to promote social justice. Students are invited to reflect on the stark contrast between our current understanding of economics, demography, ecology and disease, and our lack of adequate institutions or programs to manage them.

I undertook this project imagining that it would reproduce my earlier experience of comparing Asian civilizations and that a jointly written textbook would result. This did not happen for a number of reasons. Mainly, I think, it was because my colleagues are under too much pressure to get their own research done to commit to a collaborative project. Many of us have participated in textbook projects sponsored by commercial publishers under contracts that required only limited commitments of time.  I have continued to think about the project for more than twenty years, and I still hope to produce at least a skeletal outline of my vision; but that is a project that will have to wait until I am retired.

THE CHALLENGE OF WORLD HISTORY

At some point in my engagement in world history, it occurred to me that I had unwittingly returned to my undergraduate project inspired by the periodic table. By going from Chinese and East Asian history, to comparative Asian history, to world history I finally had the opportunity to work my way around the world and gradually fill in the rest of the spaces in the table. If only one could live so long, or remember so much. Indeed, one of the great challenges of world history, one we all confront when we teach it, is that there is so much more than one can ever know. With luck and good notes one can keep ahead of the students, but one can never gain the familiarity or degree of confidence one enjoys in one’s area of specialization. Always there is the need to make broad generalizations based on slender reading and the knowledge that one is skating on thin ice. Relative ignorance, however, is not the greatest challenge that world history presents. The greatest need is for a sense of structure, for organizing principles. This is where the contrast between the Western Civilization course with its self-referential, usually celebratory narrative, and the World History course is the greatest. We were not confronted with this problem when we wrote our comparative history of Asian civilizations because we simply assumed that each of the other civilizations of Eurasia could be described with parallel and equally powerful narratives. This assumption helped to discredit and refute Eurocentric notions of Western superiority.

The Western Civ course is usually organized as a narrative of the evolution of a cultural realm or complex. It is easy to be critical of the artificiality of this narrative, the fabrication of a story line that weaves its way through selected elements of the past and leads triumphantly, for the most part, to our own society and places us at the center of world affairs. But the story can be told, critically or uncritically, with a high degree of chronological coherence. Over time there came to be broad agreement about the outlines of the story and even the content with which an educated person in our society should have some familiarity.  At Columbia and a number of other colleges, students were actually required to read their way through a small mountain of canonical texts, usually in translation and often excerpted. In world history such approaches are elusive. Some of the earliest world history textbooks were simply Western Civ texts with chapters added on China and India. Non-western peoples were incorporated into the story line when Europeans happened upon them, or conquered them. Later iterations of the world history text became much more balanced; teams of authors wrote in informed and sensitive ways about cultures and peoples of all parts of the world. But now the problem was how to select what was important. Who should be included and who should be left out? Which facts or events were most important? Coverage became so thin that it was impossible to construct a canon of “must read” texts. Publishers, pandering to student intolerance for cognitive overload, resorted to the “boxed excerpt” and lots of pictures. Committees charged with setting curricular standards or devising tests for competency in the field of world history were at sea, and destined to remain so. But the lack of shared values and historical pasts is not the only obstacle to standardizing a world history curriculum. Even the widely common elements of the cultural regions we called “civilizations” were weakened or lost with the advent of the modern nation. Nationalisms fragmented human communities into ever smaller and more parochial units, not just the two hundred nation-states that belong to the United Nations, but many non-state fragments within them as well. Each group is entitled to its own identity, its own story. The overall picture becomes muddled and elusive.

The Western Civ enterprise was animated by the celebration of a subjective cultural identity, an imaginary. World history, as a research field, has responded to the problem of cultural identity by veering toward material history. One can tell the story of humankind by talking about technologies, contact, trade, crops, disease, in ways that crossed borders and spanned continents. But this leads to a rather thin gruel. Material and economic analysis cannot tell us all we want to know. This is the great weakness of Marxism: class contradictions are hardly the most powerful forces in history. People are far more willing to die for religious belief or patriotism, pure imaginaries, than they are to die for better working conditions or class solidarity. The search for comprehensive story lines can be frustrating. The Cold War offered the perspective of socialist and capitalist camps in competition; a post-Cold War version would see a war of civilizations – the West versus China or Islam.  As I indicated above, my solution has been to stick with structured comparisons at the case study level, abandoning any effort at comprehensive coverage. But as I have gone down this road I have come to feel that it should be possible to create some kind of a narrative structure or framework for thinking about the entirety of human experience. As noted above, I hope to spell some of this out once I am retired.

SOME THOUGHTS ABOUT GLOBALIZATION

The course I teach to two hundred freshmen every fall is about the world in the last fifty years. It is really about globalization and the information revolution. During my lifetime, since I was in college really, the world has been dramatically shrunk by new technologies of transportation and communication. Jet aircraft make is possible to visit other parts of the world within a day or less, increasing and enhancing individual interactions and expanding personal experience. The container has lowered the cost of moving goods in ways that have strengthened networks of manufacture and consumption. But the biggest changes have been in communication. All kinds of information – data, text, speech, images, sound, and music – have been merged into common digitized, electronic units that can be stored, reproduced, or communicated around the world at the speed of light. Global networks of communication and personalized communication devices, their forms and capabilities changing and morphing almost daily, have erased barriers of time and space that formerly separated us. Physical borders still exist, national identities still exist, but they do not regulate our experience in the same way they did in the past. Networks for sharing information -- for work, for entertainment, and for social contact -- are expanding and changing as well. Use of electronic devices replaces the actual with the virtual, transforming the nature of both psychological and social reality.
 
What do these changes mean for teaching world history? It is hard to say. But things will not stay the same. I will end with just two observations. One is that, increasingly, the local is also the global. We are exposed to more and more cultural, ethnic, and racial difference in an American community or on a college campus than was the case in the past. The other is that foreign travel has changed as well. When I first took students to China there was a palpable excitement about being in a strange place and a curiosity about what could be seen out of the bus window. Twenty years later, students I took to China were wired up, in their own personal spaces, oblivious to the passing scene. It is not enough to cross borders physically; the challenge is to get students to cross borders intellectually as well.

Edited by Jeanne E. Grant

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