The United States and China, 4th edition; The Japanese Today: Change and Continuity, Enlarged Edition

In addition to their collaborative effort that produced the classic history of East Asia, Fairbank and Reischauer also wrote classics of modern history that brought China and Japan up to the present. Fairbank's The United States and China, first published in 1948 and now in its fourth edition, has nourished two generations of scholars and still flashes with brilliance. It brings events up to 1982. Reischauer's The Japanese Today is still the broadest available overview of Japanese politics, history, religion, and education. Originally published in 1988, it has been brought up to the early 1990s by Jansen. These two volumes are the most reliable histories of modern China and Japan in English.