Inventing Revivalist Millennialism: Edwards and the Scottish Connection

Revivalism and millennialism are important concepts that influence contemporary evangelicalism. However it was in the Great Awakening that Jonathan Edwards and select Scottish ministers first connected revivalism and millennialism together in a new evangelical print culture. Evangelical ministers used publications and personal correspondence to hypothesise that the current Atlantic revivals were signs pointing towards Christ’s millennial kingdom. The 1740s stands as a unique decade where evangelical ministers created an influential synthesis of revivalism, social progress, and millennialism. The revivalist and millennial synthesis was a harbinger of the evangelical future for religious movements in both the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.     

Inventing the Victorian age: the Greville Diary and its Early Critics

The Journals of Charles Greville, clerk to the Privy Council from 1821 to 1859 are among the most well-known, well-respected and widely cited sources for the political and social history of their times. What is less well-known is the controversy they aroused among Greville's Victorian readers when first published (less than a decade after Greville's death) in 1874. The purpose of investigation here is to chart the course and extent of reader reaction as it unfolded during 1874–75, to explore ways of accounting for its intensity and, finally, to attempt evaluation of its impact as a cultural experience conducive to the emergence among readers of a conscious recognition of themselves as ‘Victorians’. When read in the context of the preoccupations of its first readers, Greville's Journals prove to be anything but a dead historical source. Instead, reader reaction is found to be driven by a series of contemporary concerns. They include the question of the degree of respect owing to hereditary authority; the definition of standards of honourable behaviour in protection of the private dealings of people of public reputation; and the very degree of reliability to be attributed to diary-based ‘memoirs’, given their contestable genre. Even so, participants in the controversies which broke out on all these fronts found themselves admitting common ground in acknowledging across their differences that the ‘Victorian’ age in which they lived was a decisive cultural and political break from the past world the Journals recorded.     

"For God Distinguishes the People of Earth as in Heaven": Hildegard of Bingen's Social Ideas

Despite the massive increase in scholarship dealing with various aspects of the work of Hildegard of Bingen over the last decade, her social ideas have been comparatively neglected. This is not surprising since Hildegard made few direct pronouncements on social relations and when she did, most famously in her letter to Tenxwind of Andernach, she appears to be defending an elitist notion of hereditary privilege against the more egalitarian views of her correspondent.
This paper seeks to identify and describe Hildegard's social ideas by examining her direct and indirect statements on the subject and comparing her notions about the division of society with those of her contemporaries. The idea that Hildegard's social thought was predicated on a strict division between the free and unfree, par-ticularly the free and non-free nobility ( Edelfrei and ministeriales ), a classification peculiar to twelfth-century Germany, is examined in the light of these findings. I argue that Hildegard's views are more complicated than a reading of the Tenxwind letter would suggest and that her understanding allows for a more nuanced view of society than that of her contemporaries. It is also suggested that Hildegard's views reflect a real grasp of the power relations operating in the world around her and that her practice is, in turn, founded upon this understanding.     

Inventing traditions: interests,parables and nostalgia in the history of nuclear energy

Abstract

From the late 1960s on, light-water designs dominated the market for nuclear reactors in most Western countries. Up to that point in time, many national governments, scientists and industrialists had favoured the rival concepts of heavy-water and graphite-moderated plants. The article focuses on Sweden and West Germany, where central actors only reluctantly gave up their support for domestically developed heavy-water solutions. Studying new archival material and adopting Hobsbawm and Ranger’s concept of the ‘invention of tradition’, the authors analyze how contemporary actors mobilized both the nation and the past when arguing for plants using natural uranium and heavy water. The paper documents how autarkic arguments were superseded by nostalgic sentiments, and how-subsequently-historians have come to perpetuate apologetic parables like ‘Swedish line’ and ‘tradition’, respectively.     

韩中建交后韩国华侨社会地位变化考察

采用定量分析的方法,对在韩华侨人数变化的趋势、有关在韩华侨研究的概况进行了分析;从政府对华侨的关注及政策的改进、韩中民间经济贸易关系加速、韩国华侨扩大对外交流的努力、华侨学校的再兴等方面阐述了韩中建交后韩国华侨社会的变化;并从政治、经济、社会、文化等层面对韩国华侨地位加以评估。结论是,由于韩国政府对外国人政策的变化,中国人在韩国的影响力日趋显著;受教育、人才等因素的影响,在韩华侨在韩国的地位并无明显改善;随着新华侨影响幅度的加强,在韩华侨社会有很大的发展前景;韩国政府对于外国人的政策已有相应程度的改善,包容多种文化的政治态度应予以肯定。     

从移民到选民：1965年以来美国华人社会的发展变化

196 5年是美国华人发展历史的分水岭。美国政府于该年修改移民法 ,承认种族移民机会平等。此后华人移民源源不断涌入美国 ,成为美国增长速度最快的移民群体。随着华人社会规模迅速扩大以及经济和专业实力的激增 ,美国华人开始积极参选参政 ,争取与其社会地位相当的政治权利。从移民到选民 ,是美国华人落地生根、茁壮成长的过程。假以时日 ,随着华人移民数量进一步激增 ,华人选民的政治影响力将有望接近美国犹太裔选民。