新史学:历史学者的永恒追求 --并以此纪念《史学月刊》创刊300期

作为史学发展进程中一种带有规律性的史学现象的新史学,是历史学发展的内在要求和历史学者的永恒追求。史学史表明,历史学的发展历程,在本质上就是一个一代一代的历史学者在传承既有史学文化遗产的基础上追求新史学的永无止境的过程。历史学者对新史学的追求,是历史学者史家主体意识的鲜明而集中的体现。历史学者所追求的新史学,虽有明确的方向性,但一般只是一个模糊的轮廓。正是通过、并且正是在历史学者对新史学孜孜不倦的永恒追求中,史学不断实现着对自身的超越。     

Nietzsche as Deep Historian

The recent biocultural turn in evolutionary and neurological research suggests that prior efforts to combine historical and biological thinking, often dismissed as crude biological determinism, warrant a second look. In this essay, I show how a number of Nietzsche’s main ideas about historiography anticipate these developments. Nietzsche insisted that the study of history could assimilate the natural sciences by overcoming fixed disciplinary assumptions about when history begins, thereby extending the historical timeline deep into our species’ past. He also described the ongoing transformations in human mental structure that have been generated through the complex historical interaction of human biology and culture. Nietzsche viewed this interaction as crucial to understanding historical phenomena such as the power of religious organization and ritual, the emergence of democratic egalitarianism, and the formation of entrenched social hierarchies.     

The Task of the Historian

Book reviewed in this article:
Gabrielle M. Spiegel, The past as Text: The Theory and Practice of Medieval Historiography     

The Oral Historian as Memorist

This paper explores some issues in relation to oral historyand memory that emerge in Alessandro Portelli's The Order HasBeen Carried Out. I examine the contemporary role of the oralhistorian, the relationship between the present and the pastin memory work, and make some comments about how we might articulatethe field of oral history with memory studies more closely forthe enrichment of both.     

An Historian in the Amazon

However private they may seem, emotions depend for their meanings on the communities in which they are expressed. But if emotions are shaped by and for their communities, how can we account for emotional change? After briefly surveying how historians have (1) defined the communities in which emotions have been expressed and (2) explained how and why emotions have changed, this article turns to the community of the Waorani of Amazonian Ecuador. It explores whether anthropological explanations of emotional change in that “test case” may help the historian. The answer is not entirely positive. The article concludes with some thoughts about what sorts of collaborations between historians and anthropologists might be more productive for emotions studies.     

The Historian and the Church

DEREK BEALES AND GEOFFREY BEST, eds. History, Society and the Churches: Essays in Honour of Owen Chadwick. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1985. Pp. x, 335. $49.50 (US).