The “new” social history and the anthropological history of modern Mexico

Tutino, John. From Insurrection to Revolution in Mexico: Social Bases of Agrarian Violence 1750–1940. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986. xvii + 425 pp. including appendices, bibliography, and index. $42.50 cloth.

Beezley, William H. Judas at the Jockey Club and Other Episodes of Porfirian Mexico. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1987. ix + 181 pp. including notes, bibliography, and index. $19.95 cloth.     

Tourism and the “villagers without history”: the case of Yubeng

In recent years, Tibetan Yubeng Village, located in southwest China, has become a hot spot for studying community tourism development in China's minority areas. Studies of Yubeng Village have been made on two tourism benefit distribution systems that are dominated by the community: the accommodation income distribution system and the caravan rotation system. Analysis and discussion of researchers are based on the formation, change, and influence of these two systems. However, different researchers have different interpretations of some fundamental facts, whether in terms of the time of the systems’ changes or in terms of the specific contents of such changes. Based on firsthand interview records and auxiliary secondhand materials obtained from field investigation, this study mainly takes “time of system change” as an example to discuss the reasons for these differences and advises that researchers should be more rigorous when facing those fundamental facts.     

Reading “wrecks of history” and the Harley family narrative

During the English civil wars, many elite families faced the destruction of the buildings, monuments, and movables that had served for centuries as testaments to their social standing. The Harleys of Brampton Bryan in Herefordshire faced just this situation after their estate was demolished during a Royalist siege in 1644. While the family had ample cause to lament, this study reveals that destruction could also be framed as a generative force. In this framework, the broken artefact works in multiple ways, recalling the intact pre-war family while simultaneously attesting to its suffering and sacrifice. As the Harleys and those close to them wrote about loss and destruction, they evoke the family’s ancient prestige and re-frame loss in a way that lays the groundwork for local reconciliation and the success of the Harley line. Out of the ruins of their lives, the Harleys are re-created as a godly, genteel family.     

Early history of the state — West and east

Michael Mann, The Sources of Social Power, vol. 1, A History of Power from the Beginning to A.D. 1760, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1986, pp.549. UK £12.95 (paper).

John A. Hall, Powers and Liberties: The Causes and Consequences of the Rise of the West, London, Penguin Books, 1986, pp.272. $14.95 (paper).     

Construction of Yan Fu’s view on social history and the turning of modern history

The construction of Yan Fu’s view on social history has combined the indigenization of Western historiography and the modernization of traditional Chinese historiography, which reflects the characteristic of a change towards modern historiography. The academic sources of Yan’s view on social history include some Western thoughts such as Herbert Spencer’s social Darwinist theory, Edward Jenks’ patriarchal clan system theory, John Seeley’s political historiography, etc.; and also many indigenous sources such as Yang Zhu’s self benefit, Mozi’s selfless love, Buddhist views on mood, etc.     

War-like history or diplomatic history? Contentions over the past and regional orders in Northeast Asia

Northeast Asian countries have been engaged in disputes over history. While their historical contentions have caused suspicion and friction among them, I argue that they have also served as a medium of dialogue that helps establish a common understanding about the individual countries’ contemporary reality and future direction. Historical contentions contribute to such a dialogue if and only if two conditions are met: regional actors recognise each other as legitimate participants in a dialogue about the salient past; and they contend over the past within a common framework of meaning. Northeast Asia, through historical contentions in the 1980s and 1990s, produced an embryonic form of a regional public sphere that made possible transnational communications about the region's future and each nation's desires, but it now stands at a fork between strengthening the regional public sphere and fracturing it into a contentious regional sphere.? ?. Earlier drafts of the article were presented at The Emergence of East Asian Community: Material and Ideational Foundation, Watson Institute for International Studies, Brown University, June 2006, and Re-envisioning Asia–Pacific Security: A Regional–Global Nexus, Australian National University, Canberra, August 2006, organised respectively by Yong-Wook Lee and Bill Tow. My research for the article was facilitated by a fellowship from East Asia Institute and a research grant from Smith Richardson Foundation. Yae-Ji Park provided invaluable research assistance. Many, including Hayward Alker, Jia Qingguo, Kim Byung-Kook, Kim Ha-Jeong, Kim Tae-Hyun, Nobori Amiko, Soeya Yoshihide, and Zhang Haibin, offered helpful comments and/or helped make arrangements for my research in the region. I gratefully acknowledge their assistance. View all notes     

Pacific Island history at the Australian national university: The place and the people ∗

Abstract

This article describes the context in which Pacific Island history developed at ANU. It suggests ways in which its agenda and methods were influenced by its loction in the Australian capital in 1946, by a budget which expanded until 1975 and has contracted ever since, and by ANU's evolving management structures. The Department of Pacific History expanded to include Southeast Asia, and (in 1991) merged into a Division of Pacific and Asian History, reflecting altered priorities. The original intimacy fostered collegiality between Fellows and Scholars, which has largely survived the growth of the School and the elaboration of procedures. The article describes the resources which have been created, and the non‐print media which many scholars pioneered. It ends by surveying the diverse backgrounds and later careers of its scholars.     

Vienna and the Jews, 1867–1938: A cultural history

This article examines Ernest Belfort Bax's interpretation of the French Revolution and traces the impact that his idea of the Revolution had on his philosophy and his political thought. The first section considers Bax's understanding of the Revolution in the context of his theory of history and analyses his conception of the Revolution's legacy, drawing particularly on his portraits of Robespierre, Marat and Babeuf. The second section shows how the lessons Bax drew from this history shaped his socialist republicanism and discusses his support for Jacobin methods of revolutionary change. The third section of the article looks at the ways in which Bax's reading of revolutionary history affected his internationalism and shows how his ‘anti-patriotism’ led him to support the Anglo-French campaign in 1914. I argue that the Bax's understanding of the French Revolution gave body to his philosophy and greatly influenced his understanding of the socialist struggle. Bax believed that socialists had history on their side, but was so emboldened by the idea of the Revolution that he was led to advance a view of socialist change that undermined the historic values that socialism was supposed to enshrine.     

New Historiography for the cultivation of the character of the “new citizen”: Liang Qichao’s ideas of history education and their practice

ABSTRACT

An advocate for modern Chinese historiography, Liang Qichao’s “new historiography” was ideologically quite closely tied to traditional Confucian historiography: his idea of “historiography” was both a form of scholarship for the provision of knowledge, as well as a type of learning for the cultivation of moral character. The fundamental objective of “new historiography” was to use the history of national development and evolution to educate the people, helping them to become nationally conscious “citizens.” However, according to Liang Qichao’s conception of history, the nationalist aspect of “new historiography” ultimately rested in the cultivation of individual character, not in imparting the concept of nationhood. During the movement to “systematize national heritage,” in his practicing of historiography, Liang primarily studied and compiled Chinese academic and intellectual histories, focusing particularly on Confucian history: he interpreted Confucianism and the cream of Chinese scholarship as a kind of “philosophy of life.” Liang’s historiographical practices eventually took shape as a form of moral education to cultivate the leading talents of society when the country was going through a transformation, while in the process signaling his profound repudiation of the empirical emphasis in historical research of the times.     

The golden and the brazen world: Papers in literature and history, 1650–1800

From the seventeenth century onwards, English Reformed ministers engaged in lively correspondence and publishing exchanges with men from different countries and Protestant traditions. In the eighteenth century, appreciation of their shared intellectual and cultural heritage and a desire to sustain the patterns for religious living it encouraged inflected the content and style of textual interactions among Halle Pietists, English dissenters and New England Congregationalists. Interest in the present state of religious life was also important, and therefore news about awakenings and materials for pastoral care circulated around Europe and North America through existing channels and by new means. Their encounters and the texts that they produced were mutually generative, and the language and manner of the participants' personal interactions were important features of published works. These personal associations, publishing activities and discursive styles can be understood as aspects of the literary sociology of a religious culture that valued intellectual and emotional engagements and sought to inculcate religion through education and friendship.