THE PIKA IS OUR FRIEND

Soon a furry-faced head with bright eyes and rounded ears will pop up and peer out.You are meeting the plateau pika. Its Tibetan name is abra and its scientific name Ochotona curzoniae.     

THE PIKA IS OUR FRIEND

Soon a furry-faced head with bright eyes and rounded ears will pop up and peer out.You are meeting the plateau pika. Its Tibetan name is abra and its scientific name Ochotona curzoniae.     

WHAT CONDITION OUR CONDITION IS IN

In Humanism in Intercultural Perspective, editors Jörn Rüsen and Henner Laass outline their project of renewing the foundations of the notion of “humanism.” They collect a large variety of contributions they hope will be conducive to this aim. Yet the architecture of the project leaves open a long list of conceptual problems, concerning in particular: the integration of cultural diversity into humanism; the relationship between humanism and the political; the way in which normativity is incorporated into humanism; and the question as to the place of historicity in the human condition. An extended discussion of Elisio Macamo's, Dipesh Chakrabarty's, and Friedrich Wilhelm Graf's contributions to the volume serves to further elucidate these problems and to explore ways in which they might possibly be solved.     

论二战后期中英美围绕香港战后地位问题的交涉与斗争

在第二次世界大战后期,美国、英国和中国围绕香港的战后地位问题展开激烈斗争。美国政府支持战后由中国收回香港主权。罗斯福总统为此作出许多外交努力。英国拒绝战后将香港主权交还中国。这样,蒋介石将希望完全寄予美国的支持上。但是在战争结束前夕,美国与苏联开始进行冷战,美国需要英国的支持,因此放弃了原来的政策。其结果是英国在战争结束时重新占领香港。     

19世纪末至20世纪20年代美国外交思想探析

从19世纪末叶以来,美国外交思想经历了从孤立主义向所谓的“国际主义”的转变,这种转变到了第一次世界大战爆发后基本完成,其核心内容是美国借助着强大的经济、军事和化力量,大踏步地迈向国际政治竞技场,实现这一时期绝大多数美国领导人梦寐以求的世界领袖地位。然而,这种转变在国内外遇到了强大的阻力,最终把美国的世界领袖梦想化为烟云。不过,美国的政治、经济和战略等利益已经使美国无可解脱地与世界联系在一起。就美国外交而言,这是一个不可逆转的趋势,美国人厌恶卷入大洋之外政治事务的传统心态由此正发生着变化,这也预示着美国力图充任世界领袖的时代正在缓慢地到来。     

SCANDINAVIANS AND THE LEAGUE OF NATIONS SECRETARIAT, 1919–1946

This article reintroduces the Scandinavian perspective on interwar internationalism by mapping and analysing the Scandinavian staff in the League Secretariat. Combining quantitative and qualitative sources, the article explores how the Scandinavian members of staff were viewed by and situated in the institutional topography of the League Secretariat; how they were related to and positioned towards the national foreign policy establishment; and what the postwar trajectories of the Scandinavian League staff looked like. With these perspectives, the article offers three key insights: First, the interplay between the League Secretariat and the foreign policy strategies pursued by the Scandinavians, was highly productive, and the international issues that different Scandinavian countries engaged with through the League staff was substantially determined by the institutional set-up of the League. Second, we note clear differences in terms of strategy and commitment between the three countries’ Ministries of Foreign Affairs (MFAs). Third, the careers of the Scandinavians working in the Secretariat show a clear continuity of Scandinavian internationalism across the Second World War. The experience, prestige and networks gained from working in the League Secretariat often translated into key positions in postwar IOs or within the new multilateral parts of the MFAs.     

International Women’s Day in China: Feminism Meets Militarised Nationalism and Competing Political Party Programs

This article examines the contested history of International Women’s Day (IWD) in China during the first half of the twentieth century. It explores the processes of cooption and subsumption that have diminished the “international” in IWD in the Chinese context as the feminist movement confronted powerful forces of nation building, party building and militarised warfare as battles waged between Japan and China, and between the Chinese Communist Party and the Nationalist Party. It argues that IWD was put to use by myriad competing groups and these appropriations diminished the event’s original goal of forging international solidarity among women around the world.     

Historical shifts in remembering China’s “Nanjing Massacre”

ABSTRACT

Immediately after the occurrence of the Nanjing Massacre, it was reported by both official and nonofficial media, and followed by witness accounts and victim recollections. All this formed the basic memory of the atrocity in Chinese society. After Japan’s surrender in 1945, the National Government conducted preliminary investigations and organized memorial services. However, the investigation was interrupted by the outbreak of the Civil War (1947–49). After the Communist victory in 1949, relationships between the Communists and Nationalists, China and United States and China and Japan all played a role in suppressing and even forgetting the memory of the Nanjing Massacre. It was not until the 1980s, after the normalization of Sino-Japanese relations, that the memory finally entered a process of reconstruction.     

German volunteers in the armed conflicts of the Italian Risorgimento 1834–70

Abstract

Between 1834 and 1870, Germans participated in the armed conflicts of the Italian Risorgimento in the ranks of both Mazzini and Garibaldi and of the Pope and Francis II of Naples. While acknowledging the difficulty in analysing the motives of historical actors, the essay compares the reasons that led these Germans to volunteer and fight. For those who fought for the cause of Italian unity, the networks created in exile in the 1830s remained decisive down to 1870, whereas the mobilization of volunteers in Germany for the Papal states reached its height only later between 1867 and 1870. Despite these chronological differences, the methods used in terms of the media and forms of organization to mobilize the volunteers and to legitimize war were very similar across the political spectrum. The foreign volunteers were described by their own side as brothers, but as mere mercenaries by the respective enemy side. At the same time, Germans and Italians brought their national stereotypes to the various armed groups and armies in which they served and in ways that made the latter important places for the staging of national ‘re-virilization’ achieved through heroic fighting.     

Military and Maritime Evidence of Pandemic Influenza in Canada during the Summer of 1918

Analysis of archival correspondence, the daily logs of troopships transporting soldiers to Europe and the Commonwealth War Graves Commission database for soldier deaths from pneumonia and influenza across Canada indicate that influenza was more common during the summer of 1918 than previously thought. Evidence of pandemic influenza so close to the outbreak of the fall wave calls into question the storyline of a mutated virus causing the emergence of the fall wave of the 1918 influenza pandemic. This highlights the significance of other host, social and environmental circumstances, many related to the First world war, that may have contributed to the severity and timing of pandemic waves in Canada.     

“生态旅游”是实现旅游可持续发展的核心

文章从生态旅游的概念、特性及可持续发展的本质出发,系统阐述了生态旅游与可持续发展的关系,认为生态旅游既符合旅游发展趋势,又是满足旅游者行为和旅游可持续发展的最佳契合点, 是实现旅游可持续发展的核心。     

Economic Consequences Of The German Occupation Of Norway, 1940–1945

Since the liberation from the German occupation of 1940–1945, the dominant national narrative has been of the far-reaching exploitation and destruction of the Norwegian economy by the occupant forces. The scholarly basis for this narrative was a book written by Odd Aukrust and Petter Jacob Bjerke in 1945. The narrative formed an important basis for the Norwegian variant of economic reconstruction following liberation and has also dominated historiography. However, Aukrust and Bjerve’s presentation of the bleak situation in 1945 was exaggerated and is, historically speaking, untenable. Another conclusion is that the German occupation initiated a 20-year period in which the Norwegian economy was less open and exposed to internal and external competition than in any other period subsequent to Norway entering the liberal age of free trade and free international capital transactions in the middle of the 19th century.     

发达国家的农业现代化对我国农业发展的启示

本文系统地分析了发达国家农业现代化的特点,从发达国家农业现代化与我国农业生产现状的结合点上,探讨了今后我国农业发展的途径与策略。     

THE DEMOGRAPHIC WINDOW AND ECONOMIC DEPENDENCY RATIO IN THE HONG KONG SAR

Hong Kong, like other countries with developed economies, is experiencing significant population ageing. The shift in the population age structure results from a combination of decreasing mortality rates and prolonged low fertility rates. This paper investigates the economic impact of changes in a population's age structure. We forecast on sex-specific labour force participation rates (LFPRs) and the economic dependency ratio (EDR) using different scenarios. Our results show that the below-unity level for the EDR—prevalent since 1996—will exceed unity in 2015 and rise steeply thereafter. By 2036, the projected EDR will reach an unprecedented high of 1.4, where every three economically-inactive persons will be supported by two economically-active persons in Hong Kong. This projection not only reflects a significant age shift towards the older end of the age spectrum, but is also driven by declining LFPRs among men.     

TO THE PLANETARIUM—THERE IS STILL TIME!

This review essay examines James McFarland's Constellation: Friedrich Nietzsche and Walter Benjamin in the Now‐Time of History, which stages a comparative reading of the two thinkers’ works and argues that they shared a resistance to the conventions of nineteenth‐century historicism as well as a desire to attend not to causation as a force in history but rather to the importance of each individual “present.” Benjamin's term “dialectics at a standstill” is a formulation only a reader of Nietzsche could have produced, as McFarland ably demonstrates. This review essay also delves into Benjamin's own use of the “constellation” motif, identifying complexities McFarland leaves out of his account. Influenced by Nietzsche's own uses of astronomical and astrological motifs, Benjamin employed the image of the constellation as a symbol not only for temporality (say, of the time it takes for starlight to reach our planet). He also used it to examine our transforming relationship with the cosmos and with nature most broadly, and, in the famous “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” he used it as a figure for the proper relationship historians should establish between their own period and the past; this is what yields an understanding of the present moment as the Jetztzeit, the “time of the now” enjoying its own dignity beyond any causal relationship with the future it may have. However, and as this review essay suggests, Benjamin's uses of the constellation image, and of images of stars, telescopes, and planetariums more generally, were highly ambivalent. They can serve as indices of his shifting views of modernity and of his desire that modern experience, seemingly condemned to alienation, might be redeemed.     

HOW THE VISUAL IS SPATIAL: CONTEMPORARY SPATIAL HISTORY,NEO-MARXISM,AND THE GHOST OF BRAUDEL

Contemporary spatial history is founded on the potential for maps and other visualizations to show the historical constructedness of space, usually in broadly neo-Marxist terms, yet neo-Marxist geographical theory is famously critical of visual representation, especially mapping. At stake in this contradiction isn't just the relationship between digital enthusiasm and spatial theory (or the wider spatial turn), but the theoretical status of the visual itself in spatial scholarship. It raises a crucial question: how does visual material—everything from today's statistical maps and cutting-edge data graphics to the broader use of primary-source photographs or drawings—in fact shape our understanding of space, and what theoretical work does it do? By extension, how can humanists make critical theoretical interventions through their own visual production? This article proposes an analytic vocabulary of “visual argument” grounded in an image-focused rereading of two canonical bodies of work: the neo-Marxist theory most cited by spatial history (Henri Lefebvre, David Harvey, Doreen Massey, and Edward Soja) and the conspicuously uncited work of Fernand Braudel. By focusing on how these authors’ illustrations make claims about spatial subjectivity and the historicity of space—especially through visual relationships of background and foreground—I argue for a new way of understanding and responding to this work and to the visual project of spatial history today. A visual analysis highlights not only the limitations of neo-Marxism but also the pervasiveness of certain assumptions—shared across the neo-Marxists, Braudel, and digital visualization—about temporality, the natural/human dichotomy, and the methodological tensions between argument and visualization. I present my own mapping of Phoenix as one possibility for an argument-driven rethinking of familiar visual commitments, which also suggests a broader meditation on the relationship between visual and textual scholarship.