In the summer of 1962, the Swedish writer Jan Myrdal spent a month in Liuling, China, talking to peasant farmers. Their testimonies were published in English by Pantheon, under the title Report from a Chinese Village. Pantheon’s managing director, André Schiffrin, saw the book as a natural complement to the works of E. P. Thompson, Eric Hobsbawm, and other “bottom-up” historians on his backlist. The same method, he realized, could be used to create “a collective portrait of everyday life” anywhere in the world, even Chicago.
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