American

An American Missionary with Two Motherlands: Joseph Beech and West China Union University

by

│By Liping Yang, Publishing Manager, Digital Archive and eReference, Gale Asia│

Reverend Dr Joseph Beech played an instrumental role in founding and running West China Union University, first as its founding president and later its chancellor, due to his vision, foresight, and resourcefulness. Today, March 11, 2020, marks the 110th anniversary of the founding of the university, one of the thirteen Christian universities established in China before 1949. Based on a perusal and research of articles published in English periodicals such as West China Missionary News, The Chinese Recorder and Educational Review, all available in Gale’s China and the Modern World archive, as well as his correspondence with the American Methodist Episcopal Church, available in Nineteenth Century Collections Online: Asia and the West, this essay attempts to reconstruct the story of this great missionary-educator who dedicated forty years of his life to the advancement of education in China, especially West China.

Read more

The road to American Independence

by

By Carolyn Beckford, Gale Product Trainer

Every July 4th I send holiday greetings to my friends and family in the USA and they always say, “same to you”. I remind them that July 4th isn’t a holiday in the UK. As an educator, I relish the opportunity to highlight and explain why American Independence is not celebrated with euphoria in the UK as it is in America.

We can see from the map below, found in Nineteenth Century U.S. Newspapers, that the territory under British rule was once immense and spanned the globe, leading to the well-known quote that Britain had “the empire on which the sun never sets.” The British colonisation of the Americas began in 1607 and before long, colonies had been established throughout the Americas.

Read more