To search the digitized reports, select the "Images/Media" tab in the search box and limit your search to "Reports on China." To locate the exact page(s) in a report where your key words appear, select a report and repeat the search using the "search within item" box near the top of the screen.

In related news, the Guangxi Normal University Press just released a print version of the digitized reports in a twenty volume set. The publication, which was coordinated by former University of Minnesota East Asian Librarian Su Chen and prepared in close cooperation with the Archives, reproduces the reports alongside abstracts in Chinese. It also includes short biographical sketches, in English and Chinese, of the many YMCA secretaries who served in China.

Between the digital versions available online and the print version published in China, we are optimistic that this important and fascinating material will reach an even wider audience.

Trench and Camp was printed weekly in different editions for each of the thirty-two cantonments, with about half the material supplied weekly from a central editorial office in New York, and half by local reporters. Its purpose was "to print the news, to inform, to stimulate, and to help relieve the tedium and monotony of camp life" for soldiers, as well as "to be a graphic account of the life of our soldiers, whether they be drilling or fighting, at home or 'over there'" for civilians. Contributions from soldiers include descriptions of the entertainments at the camps, athletic contests, educational lectures, jokes, and poetry, as well as personal columns telling of their experiences. The YMCA Archives collections include runs, in varying degrees of completeness, for thirty different editions from across the country.

This collection presents an opportunity for researchers and YMCA professionals to access the pamphlets, many of which are available no where else, for the first time. Up until now the Archives have had no listing or index of this material.

Please also note: We are completely closed on December 26 and 27 as well as January 2nd. See our hours web page for more details.

Applications are now being accepted for the Elmer L. Andersen Research Scholars Program, which provides up to $2,000 for travel, housing, and other research related costs for scholarly research projects using materials from any of the Libraries' Archives and Special Collections. All the details are available here.

Thank you to the University YMCA, One Stop, the Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies, the wonderful staff in Wilson Library, Minitex, and the Immigration History Research Center, whose contributions of time and talent will ensure that this pilot year will be a success.

If you are curious to see what these young scholars produce, all are invited to attend the research showcase on Monday, June 27, 2011 from 5:30 pm to 7:30 pm in room 120, Andersen Library.

Monday, 7 March 2011, 12 noon -1pm
Elmer L. Andersen Library Room 120
Light refreshments will be served

During the early decades of the twentieth century, a generation of North American YMCA secretaries dedicated their lives to service in China, achieving a degree of influence upon a rapidly modernizing Chinese society that was out of all proportion to the numbers of men in the field. The watchword, popularized by the YMCAʼs master-strategist and most prolific fund-raiser, John R. Mott, was the ʻevangelization of the world in one generation.ʼ However, by the mid-ʻ20s, the International Committee which coordinated the overseas missions struggled with a series of debilitating financial crises which necessitated the demobilization of men and the termination of programs, so that by 1935, only a handful of secretaries remained in China. This presentation examines why John Mott ʻturned deaf earsʼ to the International Committee during the 1930s and who were the winners and losers of his strategy.

At 47 years of age, John Heavens describes himself as a 'born-again academic,' having spent his working life in the construction industry. At the end of a long haul of self-reinvention, he is now a registered PhD candidate in the Faculty of History at the University of Cambridge and a member of St John's College. His mission is to understand the role of religion in American responses to modernity and cultural exchange. As part of that broader project, he is initially focusing upon the foreign work in China of the YMCA International Committee, thereby explicating the complex relationship between American liberal progressivism and religious missions.