Letters and Parting Valedictions

In eleventh-century China, a growing number of local men received a classical education and played a visible role in the government. Some passed the civil service examinations and held office, but those who did not also actively engaged themselves in local administration. These local men of culture, or local literati, had a dual identity: they were influential members of local society in their hometowns, but they were also participants in an empire-wide literati community that defined itself by a shared culture and supralocal networks. This chapter provides a case study of how local literati on the fringes of officialdom negotiated between these two identities and how they both cooperated with the state in local administration and protested against it in defence of local interests. The protagonist in this chapter is Zhang Yu, a Sichuanese literatus of the early Northern Song Dynasty who never held office but commanded great respect from local officials. Using his letters, parting valedictions, and commemorative inscriptions, this chapter explores how local literati provided political counsel and communicated their demands to the government. It argues that Zhang pursued, in different genres of his writings, several agendas that complemented one another. He eagerly fashioned himself as a true literatus in the metropolitan circles, which in turn strengthened his social standing and enabled him to weigh in on local policy and speak for local interests.

Tammany Hall and the Machine Style in Black Politics

“I seen my opportunities and I took ’em,” explained George Washington Plunkitt speaking to the journalist William L. Riordan at the dawn of the twentieth century. For many college students, William Riordan's collection of musings and reminiscences from New York State Senator Plunkitt, delivered at a shoeshine stand on Manhattan's West Side, offers a definitive introduction to the history of urban machine politics. Plunkitt of Tammany Hall: A Series of Very Plain Talks on Very Practical Politics, first published in 1905, has become a ubiquitous text, frequently assigned in political science courses and excerpted in U.S. history source books. Plunkitt's reflections, while entertaining, present a transactional and opportunistic form of political practice. He famously differentiates between honest graft and dishonest graft; insists that showing up at fires to help victims is key to holding your district; declares the Irish to be natural born leaders; and derides reformers as “mornin’ glories.” He rages against the key urban reform project of the era, civil service examinations, as “the curse of the nation,” amounting to “a lot of fool questions about the number of cubic inches of water in the Atlantic and the quality of sand in the Sahara desert.” Civil service exams blocked machine politicians from distributing jobs to loyal followers, which in the case of the New York Democratic machine typically meant recently arrived Irish immigrants. As Plunkitt explains, “The Irishman is grateful. His one thought is to serve the city which gave him a home. He has this thought even before he lands in New York, for his friends here often have a good place in one of the city's departments picked out for him while he is still in the old country.” Plunkitt's characterization of the linkage between migrant arrival and municipal work points to the central role that access to city payrolls played in the economic and political history of the New York Irish. Arguably, the only other urban group that relied as heavily on city jobs for economic mobility has been African Americans.

The marriage market for immigrant families in Chosŏn Korea after the Imjin War: women, integration, and cultural capital

Challenging the myth of premodern Korea as ethnically homogenous, this study focuses on immigrant marriages in Chosŏn Korea following Japanese invasions (Imjin War, 1592–1598). By examining household registers and genealogies, I investigate the status of women who married into the families of Japanese and Ming Chinese immigrants and the social consequences of such marriages. The results unexpectedly indicate that immigrant families rarely intermarried, preferring integration with local families. As a means of acquiring social and cultural capital, Korean brides from elite families were vital to the success of immigrant families in forming social networks and in producing candidates for the civil service examinations, with failure to obtain such a bride proving a potential long-term obstacle to social advancement. There is a noticeable difference between families of Chinese and Japanese origin in this context due to the preference shown by Korean families for the descendants of Ming generals over Japanese defectors. Contributing to a growing number of studies that question whether the Korean family was fully “Confucianized” in the seventeenth century with a consequent decline in the status of women, this study argues that women possessed social and cultural capital and held particular value for immigrant families.

FEDERAL CIVIL SERVICE EXAMINATIONS FOR UNIVERSITY FACULTY AND AFFIRMATIVE ACTIONS FOR RACIAL EQUALITY

In this study, quali-quanti methodology was applied to analyze the implementation of Law no. 12,990/2014 on quotas for Black candidates at 63 federal universities and 38 federal ‘institutes’ (secondary and vocational training), during the period that spanned 2014 to 2018. The law reserves 20% of teaching vacancies filled through federal civil servant examinations for Black people. We observe the distance that separates the legally-stipulated conditions and actual practice in these institutions. As five years have now gone by since the passage of this legislation, it seems safe to say that the goal of expanding racial/color diversity in federal civil service will not be achieved through public examinations for teaching careers. Moreover, meeting this goal becomes progressively harder, given the present scenario of resurgence of meritocratic discourses that question the legitimacy of affirmative actions for Afro-Brazilians.

Introduction

An emperor does not rule a country alone. He needs to recruit officials to assist in governing the realm. The Song founder inherited a civil service examinations system originating in the Sui dynasty (581–618) that rose to prominence in the Tang dynasty (618–907), whose chief purpose became the selection of deserving candidates for public service. Yet the extent to which the examination system could select genuinely capable and morally upright officials was always in question, since it evaluated candidates based primarily on written work, not personal conduct. In reaction, some officials in the Northern Song (960–1127) argued that government schools should play some role in the official recruitment process to better guarantee the moral comportment of students. Fan Zhongyan ...

Pediatric dentistry content in civil service examinations in the state of paraíba: how is this specialty being addressed?

This research study aimed at evaluating the content related to pediatric dentistry addressed in civil service examinations in the state of Paraíba through the analysis and classification of questions. Questions related to pediatric dentistry addressed in civil service examinations for the dentist position in the Family Health Program, held in the state of Paraíba, between the years 2001 and 2017 were evaluated. Across the state, 107 civil service examinations were identified and, when applying the exclusion criteria, 9 identical tests were found, consequently, being removed, totaling 98 examinations. After the analysis, 3,949 questions were obtained and only 54 questions were related to pediatric dentistry, representing 1.36% of total questions. The questions were classified according to the topic and the cognitive level according to the BLOOM's revised taxonomy. Results showed that topics related to oral rehabilitation and surgical management, including questions regarding anesthesia, surgery, pulp therapy, endodontic treatment, operative and restorative dentistry, dental materials, traumatic injuries and prosthesis/rehabilitation corresponded to 42% of the questions. The most prevalent cognitive domains were recall and analyze, corresponding to 45% and 29%, respectively. Thus, questions concerning oral rehabilitation and surgical management were the most addressed in civil service examinations, in which the domains remember and analyze were predominant. There were no questions requiring complex cognitive domain such as assessing and creating.