Pierre Fuller's Modern Erasures is one of the better examples of historical investigations that span China's long revolutionary trajectory, from the May Fourth era to the Cultural Revolution. Even in the decades before it became possible to access archives in mainland China, there have always been a few historians who seamlessly moved between the late Qing, the Republican era, and the People's Republic of China (PRC). Their work was and often remains incredibly valuable, especially because, until recently, the Mao era remained the almost exclusive domain of political scientists, who asked (and still ask, with few exceptions) very different questions. Recently, perhaps due to the availability of sources from the Mao era, perhaps because of the exhaustion of certain intellectual paradigms, many more historians of the Late Qing/Republican period have expanded their scope of analysis “across the 1949 divide.” As somebody whose research originally focused on the 1910s and 1920s...

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