本书不是把城市作为历史人物和事件的舞台，而是综合考察北京这个古老帝都本身的转型，以及被塑造成现代中国“文化城市”的过程。作者指出，今天所认为的“老北京”其实并不很老，它并不是帝都时代的北京，而是不那么遥远的民国北京。今天对老北京的兴趣在一定程度上是将历史商业化的产物。北京不仅是政治活动中心，也是各类人群的生存社会。在作者的观察视野下，北京城获得了深刻的、实质性的学者叙述。 ——唐晓峰 《民国北京城》是第一部对民国时期北京的空间变迁、日常物质生活及其文化表述做出系统研究的重要学术专著，与其他研究北京的著作相比，该书的一个独特视点在于对民国时期北京的普通人群及其日常生活实践的极大关注。“传统的回收”这一概念的独到应用具有很大的启示，它对过去与现在、旧与新、物质与文化的认识提供了一个新的辩证的视点。 ——张鹂

这是一部西方学者近年来发表的关于中国近现代史的论文辑选，作者都是极具知名度的学者。大致可分四个方面：中国与世界、中国革命、日常生活、历史之传承与延续。 美国的中国近现代史研究通过“区域研究”而进入学术界，又通过内部的挑战和论争，在过去的半个世纪中自觉地“走出区域研究”。对区域研究所带来的有意无意的惯性的批评今天仍然在持续。 本书收录了12篇过去20年里发表在重要英语出版物上的关于中国近现代史的文章。文章的作者是美国、加拿大、澳大利亚以及英国仍然活跃在学术界的学者。全书可分世界•区域•国家、革命作为历史变化的形式、城市与日常生活史、社会与历史之延续四个部分，大致反映了“走出区域研究”以后的学术关怀。

Old Beijing has become a subject of growing fascination in contemporary China since the 1980s. While physical remnants from the past are being bulldozed every day to make space for glass-walled skyscrapers and towering apartment buildings, nostalgia for the old city is booming. Madeleine Yue Dong offers the first comprehensive history of Republican Beijing, examining how the capital acquired its identity as a consummately "traditional" Chinese city. For residents of Beijing, the heart of the city lay in the labor-intensive activities of "recycling," a primary mode of material and cultural production and circulation that came to characterize Republican Beijing. An omnipresent process of recycling and re-use unified Beijing's fragmented and stratified markets into one circulation system. These material practices evoked an air of nostalgia that permeated daily life. Paradoxically, the "old Beijing" toward which this nostalgia was directed was not the imperial capital of the past, but the living Republican city. Such nostalgia toward the present, the author argues, was not an empty sentiment, but an essential characteristic of Chinese modernity.

Is modernity in non-Western societies always an “alternative” modernity, a derivative copy of an “original modernity” that began in the West ? No, answer the contributors to this book, who then offer an absorbing set of case studies from modern China to make their point. By focusing on people’s ordinary routines of working, eating, going to school, and traveling, the authors examine the notion of modernity as it has been staged in the minute details of Chinese life. Essays explore people’s basic search for food, water, and lighting during the late-Qing -- early republican era; contradictory attitudes toward women and the violence of foot-binding; the role of Chinese scientists in promoting a shift to modern, nationalistic discourses; the growing popularity of savings banks among urban Chinese in the early twentieth century; the transnational and national identities of returned overseas Chinese in Xiamen, Fujian Province; and middle-class “Shanghai travelers” who imagined themselves as cosmopolitan consumers. Looking at the post-Mao reform era of the late twentieth century, contributors explore the theme of “revaluation” – that is, the way China’s move into global capitalism is commoditizing goods and services that previously were not for sale, from domestic labor to recycling and water resources, in an increasingly consumer-oriented society.