The volume looks back to the revolutionary People's Republic of China between 1949 and 1976 from an explicitly historical perspective, using historical materials such as memoirs and archives. While there was a great deal published on the revolutionary period by political scientists when these events were contemporaneous or near contemporaneous, there is little in the field that both takes advantage of the temporal distance and perspective that we now have in combination with the range of primary materials that have come available in the last ten to fifteen years. The volume contains essays on a variety of particular subjects on the revolutionary People's Republic of China, and, unlike most of the other work on the period that has either come out recently or is in press, gives some coverage to the entirety of the period.