The History of Leadership
Through the Lens of
Mao’s China: NHD’s 2013
Summer Institute
T
Pat Ramsey
State Coordinator, National History Day in Arkansas, Social Studies Education Coordinator at the University of Central Arkansas
wo weeks in China: The Great Wall, the Forbidden
City, Shanghai? How intriguing! Seeing these
places not as a tourist but as a scholar studying
Mao Zedong’s leadership role in the long, often violent,
and world-changing revolution that would make China
an economic and political adversary of the United States?
I was definitely interested! In 2013, National History Day
offered a summer institute, “Understanding Leadership:
China in the Twentieth Century,” to History Day teachers
who wanted to broaden their understanding of Mao’s
China as a leadership model. The extensive reading list
included works that would give us perspectives of the
revolution from a variety of players, those who were
W
followers of Mao, and those who were not. Our travels
would bring us to the very streets where some of the
revolutionary dramas described in those readings had
played out. We would get to meet Chinese residents who
were living with the outcomes of Mao’s legacy.
2013 China Institute participants gathered in the Bund in Shanghai, China.
hile I am not a regular classroom teacher, I get to interact with many secondary students through my dual roles as
a field supervisor of university teacher-interns and the state coordinator of the National History Day in Arkansas
program. The China Institute offered a rich mixture of historical events and ideas that I could use in developing
lesson plans with my college students and in History Day workshops with teachers and students. I applied for the institute, and
as they say, the rest is history.
Off we went, a lively mix of teachers and NHD staff, to spend two weeks looking for evidence of the impact of Mao’s leadership.
My own, individual quest was to find an answer to a question: Can we consider someone a successful leader if many of his
policies bring serious hardship and tragedy to his followers?
NATIONAL HISTORY DAY 2015
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