User:CWH/Scratches on Our Minds

Scratches on Our Minds is a book published by Harold Isaacs that in 1958, and frequently reprinted in following decades.

As late as 2008, Jeffrey Wasserstrom recommended it as "one of the best places to begin a discussion of the long-term evolution of the American China Dream and American China Nightmare" The economist Amartya Sen wrote that

Sen, Amartya. “Indian Traditions & the Western Imagination.” Daedalus 134, no. 4 (2005): 168–85. http://www.jstor.org/stable/20028020.

Structure and argument
“These American images of China tend largely to come in jostling pairs.” [70]
 * 1. The Age of Respect (Eighteenth Century)
 * 2. The Age of Contempt (1840-1905)
 * 3. The Age of Benevolence (1905-1937)
 * 4. The Age of Admiration (1937-1944)
 * 5. The Age of Disenchantment (1944-1949)
 * 6. The Age of Hostility (1949 - 0

Reception
The review of the first edition in the Sunday New York Times, called Isaacs a "kind of commuter between the journalistic and academic worlds." The reviewer in Journal of Asian Studies objected that the book was "not written with complete theoretical rigor" and that Isaacs mentions no checks or controls on his interviews. He felt Isaacs might have slanted his findings in favor of the irrational rather than rational images.

The book proved to have staying power, however. In ???, Press brought out a paperback edition under the title, and over the next ?? years, with new prefaces by the author.

Steven W. Mosher, for instance, adopted its time frame from