The founding of the Edinburgh medical school

This article seeks to show that the usual accounts of the founding of the Edinburgh Medical Faculty in 1726 give undue prominence to John Monro, an Edinburgh surgeon, and to George Drummond, later Lord Provost of Edinburgh. They do so because their authors have ignored the ways in which patronage appointments, such as medical professorships, were and had been dispensed in the city of Edinburgh and in its university. There the Town Council was only nominally independent when it came to making professors. Medical historians have been equally cavalier in their treatment of the roles of leading politicians, especially of Archibald Campbell, first Earl of Ilay and later third Duke of Argyll, who was the most important Scottish politician working between c. 1716 and his death inl 1761. A more realistic view of the history of Scottish medicine would not ignore the realities of politics and the relation of these to institutions, such as the Edinburgh Medical Faculty.     

物议四起的民国时期中学会考

1932年5月推行的中学毕业会考是整顿当时中学教育的一个利器,也是一次重要且艰难的基础教育评价制度设计。政府的控制动机和整肃目的十分明显,但对稳定中学教学秩序,提高教学质量和毕业水准不为无利。会考自推行之日一直是物议不断,贬褒互现,总体上批评多于赞成。该决策缺乏必要的民意基础和科学论证,反映出制度设计缺陷与行政干预过滥。研究民国时期中学会考制度可为改革目前高中会考及中学评价机制提供历史观照。     

Revisiting the Urban Classics

The classic urban pluralist studies are reconceptualized as providing alternative theoretical perspectives. These political order and economic development perspectives exert an enduring influence, as seen in urban regime theory and in Paul Peterson's economistic conception of politics in City Limits. A supplementary theoretical perspective is proposed that addresses the problem of inequality and takes the promotion of social justice as the principal task of urban governance. Reconciling the three perspectives provides a more comprehensive framework for conducting research.     

Revisiting the Cuban Missile Crisis

Book reviewed in this article:
Ernest R. May and Philip D. Zelikow (eds.), The Kennedy Tapes: Inside the White House during the Cuban Missile Crisis     

清代广东体制再研究

起始于乾隆二十二年的广东体制是清朝在广州地区的一项针对外国人的体制,海内外学界一般视其为一项闭关的限制贸易体制,但笔者通过对广东体制的再研究,认为广东体制应是一项旨在有效管理外国人的对外政策,其目的在于整肃边境口岸广州的秩序、进而维护中国东南沿海的秩序,而它产生于乾隆二十二年前后的国内背景是清朝正发动着旨在解决西北边患问题的准噶尔战事,由此表明以藩封体制为依据而设定的对外政策往往与解决国内重大问题的国内政策存在着互动性。     

Revisiting the Skills Agenda: A Complicated Geography

This paper revisits the skills agenda and suggests that in light of shifts from supply-side to demand-led provision within the UK higher education sector, there is a need to think more critically about the role and place of skills within university curricula. It suggests that if universities are to respond effectively to sector changes, then the increasing focus on embedding employability and skill development within curricula needs to be accompanied by consideration of how skills are understood, negotiated and given meaning at the curricula level. Consequently, this paper assesses how ‘place’ affects our understandings of skills; it moves on to address the relationship between skills and the development of student personality, before concluding with an exploration of the performance of skills, which questions what we actually mean when we talk about skills.     

关于“华侨华人与国际关系”的再思考

复杂多变的国际政治生态不断地丰富和改变着＂华侨华人与国际关系＂的内涵,特别是国际关系思想的功利主义化和行政化进程,促使＂华侨华人与国际关系＂的内涵日益融入不同层次的公共政策之中。论文借用国际关系的层次分析法,从国际体系和民族国家两个层次对＂华侨华人与国际关系＂命题的内涵进行了学理性的建构,分析了华侨华人因素在当代国际关系结构中的属性,强调了设计华侨华人战略对中国外交和中国崛起的价值和意义,同时针对华侨华人未来国际化民族取向观发表了自己的看法,认为大多数华人不能也没有条件选择国际化,他们仍将生活在民族国家之中,只能选择追求平等公民政治权利的多元社会生活。     

Revisiting the Gramsci–Bukharin relationship: Neglected symmetries

In this article I revisit the ideas of Antonio Gramsci and Nikolai Bukharin from a contextual perspective to argue for a revision in the way current scholarship on Gramsci interprets his thought as fundamentally at odds with that of Bukharin. I show in particular that if we resist the temptation to reduce Bukharin to the level of his 1921 book, Historical Materialism, and concentrate instead on his more sophisticated NEP writings of the mid-1920s a series of symmetries in the advanced thought of these two key thinkers of early 20th century Marxism emerges that have been poorly recognised in the literature on Gramsci to date.     

Late Pleistocene mammalian extinctions in North America: Taxonomy,chronology, and explanations

Toward the end of the Pleistocene, North America lost some 35 genera of mammals. It has long been assumed that all or virtually all of the extinctions occurred between 12,000 and 10,000 years ago, but detailed analyses of the radiocarbon chronology provide little support for this assumption, which seems to have been widely accepted because of the kinds of explanations felt most likely to account for the extinctions in the first place. Approaches that attribute the losses to human predation depend almost entirely on the assumed synchroneity between the extinctions and the onset of large mammal hunting by North American peoples. The fact that only two of the extinct genera have been found in a convincing kill context presents an overwhelming problem for this approach. Climatic models, on the other hand, are becoming increasingly precise and account for a wide variety of apparently synchronous biogeographic events. While a role for human activities in the extinction of some taxa is fully possible, there can be little doubt that the underlying cause of the extinctions lies in massive climatic change.     

Revisiting the South Korean developmental state after the 1997 financial crisis

This study reassesses the conventional wisdom surrounding the developmental state of South Korea (hereafter Korea) since the 1997 Korean financial crisis. The conventional wisdom is that, as a result of the continued structural reforms prompted by the crisis, the Korean developmental state, inherently characterised by active or direct state intervention, strong economic and industrial policies, the chaebol-oriented economic policy, and labour exclusion, has finally begun to dissolve in earnest. In this study, we have considered whether that is really the case and also which theoretical implications can be drawn from this consideration. Analysis of the Korean developmental state following the 1997 crisis has indicated that, quite contrary to conventional wisdom, the developmental state has continued to prevail as a core policy framework of the Korean administrations even after the crisis. There is no doubt that the continued structural and market reform after the crisis certainly undermined the Korean developmental state to a certain degree, but that does not mean the beginning of the end of the Korean developmental state at all. For much evidence strongly indicates that the Korean developmental state still remains intact and strong despite the structural reforms, on account of the successive Korean governments’ assiduous and deliberate efforts to maintain and reinforce it. Even after the crisis, the Kim Dae-Jung and post-Kim regimes have hardly abandoned many of their market interventionist policies. Such market interventionist policies, which were routinely practised under the military regime in the 1960s and 1970s, diametrically contravene the argument that the Korean developmental state has begun to dissolve as a result of structural reform after the 1997 crisis. Contrary to conventional wisdom, the Korean developmental state persists as usual. All this information, then, suggests that path dependence is in action in the case of the Korean developmental state, and this suggests a further hypothesis that the Korean developmental state is very likely to persist in the future as well, despite increasing globalisation pressure, given the strong path dependence.     

German colonial plans for Africa in the Nazi era

The German colonial plans concerning Africa in the era of National Socialism ascribed a central role the sciences. Scientists of all possible fields launched into activities. Especially subjects which were directly related to the practice of colonial policies, e.g. African languages, ethnology, law, economic sciences, and medicine, were developed. There were colonial ambitions at nearly every German university, but there was one which designated to become the centre of colonial sciences: the university of Hamburg. It has to be realized that working in this field of studies protected scientists from being drafted by the army for a long time.     

Revisiting the Parietal Art of Wonderwerk Cave,South Africa

Seen by all who visit Wonderwerk Cave, the rock paintings that adorn its walls have attracted less attention than many other aspects of the site. The paper gives a brief account of their history and significance and of factors that have constrained their study. Graffiti damage and restoration added layers through which researchers would need to delve in order to understand them archaeologically. Pointing to directions for future work, the paper concludes with discussion on a currently debated category of southern African rock art, the “non-entoptic” geometric rock art tradition, to which the Wonderwerk Cave rock paintings would belong. A shift in theoretical focus is advocated for comprehending local contingencies in the formation of rock art “traditions” rather than simply assuming the prior existence of such constructs.