Marc Bloch: the identity of a historian

Several scholars have asserted that medieval Christians believed that Jewish men menstruated. Their arguments, made in support of a grander claim that Jews as a collectivity were gendered feminine in Christian thought, rest on numerous misreadings. Though such a belief did appear around 1500, prior references to a Jewish bloody flux derived from textual traditions that were not gendered. The rupturing of Judas's belly (Acts 1:18–19) inspired accounts of heretics and other betrayers of Christ dying with blood and/or guts coming out of their anuses. In the twelfth century this anal bleeding was exegetically linked to Jewish deicidal bloodguilt via the verse ‘may His blood be upon us and upon our children’ (Matt 27:25). In the thirteenth century this motif was rationalized using terms drawn from humoral medicine. Simultaneously, a new verse was adduced in support of the notion of supernatural anal bleeding: ‘He smote His enemies in their posteriors’ (Psalms 77:66). Monthly bleeding was first alleged in 1302, but only among the male descendants of the Jews who had accepted responsibility for the crucifixion. The earliest mention of gendered, monthly bleeding appeared in the 1503 account of the ritual murder trials held in Tymau in 1494.     

20世纪30年代苏区卫生防疫运动述论

20世纪30年代,中国共产党建立的苏区革命根据地,为了保护军民健康、保障部队战斗力,开展了群众性卫生防疫运动,提出卫生防疫政策纲领,进行卫生宣传教育,厉行防疫活动,有效地防治了疾病,控制了瘟疫等传染性疾病的流行,保障了根据地的巩固发展,产生了积极的影响.     

近80年关于中国本位文化问题论战研究状况综述

20世纪30年代,由10位教授发表的<中国本位的文化建设宣言>一文引发的关于中国文化走向问题的论战,直到今天,仍引起学界不断关注.本文拟对上世纪30年代至今对该问题的研究状况作一考察.20世纪30至70年代,对于该问题基本还谈不上系统研究,只是学者借机发表自己对中西文化问题的见解.上世纪80年代,我国学术界,尤其是大陆学界,对于这场论战,在一致认同其"政治"、"党化"背景的同时,已经有研究者开始关注这场论战发生的时代、社会背景,从"政治"以外的其他角度去考察这场论战.90年代至今,学者们的研究开始超越意识形态框架,而现代化视角的引入,使得这场论战的文化及现代化意义开始渐渐凸显.     

芝加哥华人：19世纪70年代至20世纪30年代的跨国移民与商业活动

论文通过中英文原始资料,追述了芝加哥唐人街历史,论证了19世纪70年代至20世纪30年代的芝加哥华人社区在跨国移民与商业网络中的重要作用。认为芝加哥所拥有的水陆空交通枢纽的优越地理位置让城中的华人杂货业得以扩大生意范围;芝加哥的国际化氛围还培养了中餐精致饮食文化的先驱;城内的华人洗衣业也成为美国中西部城镇洗衣业的典范。这些特征都表明了芝加哥城内的华埠社区是美国中西部地区跨国移民与商贸中心的一个重要枢纽。华人企业家们不仅仅为他们个人商业的成功做出了贡献,同时也为美国中西部地区华人社区及家乡父老的集体生存、发展与成功做出了重要的贡献。     

理性的追求：抗战前浙江农民经营副业管窥

中国农民千百年来的生存之道是＂安全第一＂。抗战前浙江农民以种粮为主业,收入有限而支出庞大,必须寻求副业收入加以平衡。显然副业已成为浙江农民生存的＂安全阀＂,他们根据市场的刺激和机会理性地配置副业资源来寻求最大收益,以保证安全的最大化。但随着三十年代以降影响市场景气指数的各种不利因素的叠加,副业衰落,＂安全阀＂失效,农民生活恶化,农村经济破产。     

Engendering the Slum: Photography in East London in the 1930s

Photographs are not truthful records of reality. They are images that are always interpreted, and this essay looks at some critical interpretations of photographs taken in the 1930s of white working-class women in the streets of East London. It pays particular attention to two current critiques that tend to address two different kinds of photographs (and in so doing to constitute them as distinct genres): a Foucauldian account of photography as a form of disciplining surveillance, and a Lacanianinfluenced analysis of photography as a disruptive reminder of absence and death. By examining documentary photographs and family snapshots from the East End in the 1930s I argue, first, that both of these critical accounts require an explicit consideration of the constitution of sexual difference, since both implicitly reproduce regressive visions of (working-class) femininities. Secondly, I argue that feminist revisions of both should be deployed together in order to effect a destabilising critique of the constitution of sexual difference through photographs. I elaborate that argument by considering a third series of photographs, commissioned by Stepney Borough Council in 1937 to record housing condemned as slums in the borough. In discussing that series, I suggest that through its organisation of the spatiality and corporeality of the women photographed outside their houses that were to be demolished, a radically uncertain femininity is conjured.     

The Right to a Nice Home: housing inspection in 1930s Stockholm

This article deals with how the authorities taught the Swedes to live and how Swedish citizens came to accept such an intimate encroachment in their private lives. Why did people accept these social experts of everyday life? The answer tells us something about modern society and modernity itself.

Around the turn of the 20th century, Stockholm had one of Europe's worst housing conditions, according to Swedish experts of the time. One-room apartments were the norm, even for large families. Not all buildings had running water and often several families shared one outhouse. At the same time, the idea that the home was the place in which the conscientious citizens of the future would be raised was introduced – in Sweden as elsewhere. Dwellings became part of the social question. Many people believed that a well-functioning home would improve other aspects of life as well: men would stay at home in the evening instead of going to pubs; women would do a better job of raising the children; and public health would improve. A neglected home was seen as a sign of the exact opposite; the right to a nice home turned into a duty to live well. As an extension of this idea, housing inspections became important processes in the effort to improve the lives of citizens. The inspections were carried out by municipal employees, who were expected to monitor people's everyday lives. They functioned as housing experts, but what did these social engineers actually do? How did they become housing experts? And was their encroachment into people's daily lives accepted by ordinary citizens?     

Our Most Dangerous Enemy: Great Britain Pre-eminent in the 1930s

OTTO PFLANZE. Bismarck and the Development of Germany: Volume I: The Period of Unification, 1815–1871; Volume II: The Period of Consolidation, 1871–1880; Volume III: The Period of Fortification, 1880–1898. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990. Pp. xxx, 518; xvii, 554; ix, 474.

STIG FÖRSTER, WOLFGANG J. MOMMSEN, and RONALD ROBINSON, eds. Bismarck, Europe, and Africa: The Berlin Africa Conference 1884–1885 and the Onset of Partition. New York: German Historical Institute; Oxford University Press, 1988. Pp. xviii, 569.     

“没有了中国”:20世纪30年代中国思想界的反思

20世纪30年代,许多知识人已认识到近代以来思想界一味追随西方的弊病,由是开始了反思,转而关注中国自身的实际和需要,主要表现为努力产生中国的新政治理论,提倡新教育的中国化,呼吁建设中国本位的文化。一时间,中国化逐渐成为流行语,强调外来之说应用于实际蔚为潮流。但是,人们对于实际、中国、本位的理解却不尽相同,此中国往往与彼中国相抵牾。相对以前的西与西战,可以说思想界又出现了中与中战的局面。另一方面,人们有意识地去重塑中国,却无意识地扎进世界里不能自拔;种种中国化的背后仍是各式各样的世界化。这表明中国人陷西已深,醒然仍无以自立,整个思想界还不能对近代以来的知识和思想进行超越的系统的清理。     

浙赣铁路与浙江中西部地区的发展:以1930年代为中心

铁路交通是近代以来区域社会经济发展的全新条件之一.1930年代浙赣(杭江)铁路的兴筑,使千百年来自然形成的浙东、浙西社会经济发展不平衡的状态开始改变;浙江中西部地区主要城镇沿钱塘江分布的基本格局出现变化,铁路沿线城镇的区位优势明显提升,并逐步形成这一区域的中心城市;冲破了自然形成的流域交往格局,重新调整了人们的活动范围,拓展了腹地空间.浙赣铁路促使途经区域现代工业和旅游业的兴起,促进了传统农副业和商业的发展,改善了浙江中西部地区人们的出行条件,传播了近代文化,使沿线300万人受益.当然,这一切仅仅是一个渐变过程的开端.     

Irish Female Emigration in the 1930s: Transgressing space and culture

Following the establishment of the Irish Free State in the 1920s, the continuing levels of emigration from Ireland came as a disappointment to many who believed that British colonialism had caused and perpetuated the emigration problem. Within this context, there was a need to explain emigration in ways that deflected blame away from the new state authorities. In this article, the author contributes to a gendered analysis of these shifting constructions of emigration. Drawing upon Irish newspapers of the period, she suggests that the figure of the 'emigrant girl' was central to post-colonial discourses on emigration. During the 1930s, the emigration of thousands of young Irish women to English cities such as London sparked widespread comment and criticism. The Irish press and the Catholic hierarchy in particular propagated an image of these vulnerable young women as lost and alone in the big, bad cities of England. The author analyses the ways in which the 'emigrant girl' embodied specific representations of place, culture and gendered identity; the 'emigrant girl' embodied an Irishness marked by religion, culture and landscape. Through her transgression of physical, cultural and religious spaces, she encountered loneliness, danger and the risk of denationalisation.     

Political humanitarianism in the 1930s: Indian aid for Republican Spain

Abstract

This article examines Indian humanitarian help for Republican victims during the Spanish Civil War. It focuses in particular on aid initiatives by the Indian national movement, which were embedded in the larger quest for independence from British colonial rule. By creating their own humanitarian programme in favour of Republican Spain, Indian nationalists dissociated themselves from Britain’s foreign policy and tried to orchestrate a politics of moral superiority for themselves. The article also explores Indian participation in transnational networks of Left solidarity. Established to generate political and humanitarian support for Republican Spain, Indian actors concurrently utilized these networks to enhance their status in the international community and to advance their own end of an independent state.     

The pentiti of the Sicilian mafia in the 1930s

Mussolini had declared that Fascism, through the anti-mafia campaign entrusted to Cesare Mori, prefect of Palermo, in the second half of the 1920s, had conclusively liberated Sicily from the mafia. However, from the early 1930s a new deterioration of public order on the island was evident, and the regime was forced to launch a second, and much less publicised, repression of this phenomenon. In the course of its careful investigations the body given responsibility for pursuing this repression, the Ispettorato Generale di Pubblica Sicurezza per la Sicilia, compiled a series of reports, including the Processo verbale di denunzia relating to the area around Palermo. With a level of detail never seen before, these reports described the structure, organisation and dynamics of mafia groups. This was possible because police officers had available members of the mafia groups themselves – genuine pentiti – who had decided to make disclosures to the authorities.