Samal and Samal: Touring China, Summer 2011

Dr. Mary Hrabik Samal teaches in the Center for International Programs at Oakland University in Rochester, MI.  A political scientist who specializes in Czech and Slovak studies, her publications include K úloze a významu agrárního hnutí v českých a československých dějinách (Prague: Karolinum–Nakladatelství Univerzity Karlovy, 2001), which she edited with Dr. Jiří Šouša and Dr. Daniel E. Miller and to which she contributed a chapter; “Organization as a Crucial Variable in the Growth or Loss of Supporters: The Case of the Republican Party in the Inter-War Period,” Bohemia: Jahrbuch des Collegium Carolinum, 20 (1979); and “The Czechoslovak Republican Party of the Smallholders and Peasants and the German Minority, 1918-1939,” in The Peasantry of Eastern Europe, vol 1: Roots of Rural Transformation, Ivan Volgyes, ed. (Elmsford, NY: Pergamon Press, 1978).  In the summer of 2011, she traveled to China with her daughter, Paula Samal, a high school teacher in Michigan who accepted a summer position to teach English to Chinese English-language teachers.  The picture essay Dr. Samal assembled not only presents a glimpse of China but offers observations of the country, one of the last under communist rule, from the perspective of someone who spent a major part of her life studying communist regimes in what scholars once referred to as Eastern Europe.  Mary Hrabik Samal wrote the essay, and Paula Samal took the photos.  Click on the links below to view the Word document.