Sarah Schneewind holds degrees from Cornell University, Yale University, and Columbia University. She has published two books on the relations between state and society during the Ming era (1368-1644): Community Schools and the State in Ming China, which studies the local implementation of one central policy, and A Tale of Two Melons, which traces the way the first Ming emperor, his advisors, and others wrote about one small lucky omen, and what it meant at the local level. She has also edited a collection of essays on the creation and use of the image of the Ming founder through today, called Long Live the Emperor! She teaches Chinese history up to about 1850, and, in the lower-division survey, Japanese and Korean history through about 1200. She has been President of the Society for Ming Studies, and runs a website called "The Ming History English Translation Project." Her current major project is on shrines to living officials in Ming and what they show about popular involvement in the autocratic, bureaucratic Ming government. She is also interested in the long history of East-West sharing of ideas and things and the related historiography.

According to imperial edict in pre-modern China, an elementary school was to be established in every village in the empire for any boy to attend. This book looks at how the schools worked, how they changed over time, and who promoted them and why. Over the course of the Ming period (1368-1644), schools were sponsored first by the emperor, then by the central bureaucracy, then by local officials, and finally by the people themselves. The changing uses of schools helps us to understand how the Ming state related to society over the course of nearly 300 years, and what they can show us about community and political debates then and now.