Notice of Documents Preserved in the Record Office,at Malta

The recently found wall-paintings at North Mymms Park, Hertfordshire (a privately owned house, not open to the public), (TL 217042) are introduced, the history of the building and its relevant ownership is discussed, the paintings described, comparisons made, possible sources for the paintings considered, and date ranges suggested. An account of the subsequent conservation work is given.     

民众记忆与服装衍化--1949～2000年中国城镇民众服装流变

服装是社会变迁的组成部分.中国城镇服装以社会大文化的发展为依托,伴随生活方式、价值观念以及行为规范的变化而变化.改革开放以来,随着国家政治经济文化的健康发展,服装开始脱离社会政治和革命范式,凸现自身发展固有的逻辑.同时,中国人的审美观念不断更新,在整体上趋于西化,服装的自身功能日趋彰显.但回首过去,中国特有的、在短时间内形成民众服装急剧变革、走向革命化的现象,颇耐人寻味.在人类历史上,恐怕还没有一个民族将服装当作革命的对象、形式和重要内容,这一现象与中华民族的历史、文化、精神密切相连,是值得深入研究和长久反思的.     

Men Without Clothes: Heroic Nakedness and Greek Art

The naked men of Greek art have been an excuse for male nakedness in more recent art, but the significance of male nakedness in classical art is debated. Osborne traces the history of the representation of the naked male body in Greek art and argues that although in early Greek art nakedness was unmarked, and clothing was used only to draw special attention to men, changes in visual rhetoric led artists to make increasingly detailed reference to the male body, causing a loss of semiotic innocence. Naked male bodies thus came to carry messages about sex as well as gender. The reinstatement of the naked male body in classical art followed the development of a highly artificial convention in which beardlessness was equated with sexual immaturity and held to render the male body asexual.     

Relaxed Bodies and Comfortable Clothes: Reframing Masculinity in Post-War Australia

As Australia's Second World War servicemen began returning home, many anticipated the pleasure of stepping out of their uniforms for the last time. Yet scholarship on the role clothing played in repatriation and post-war rehabilitation in Australia remains scarce. Exploring the post-war swing towards sportswear, the article considers the growing idea of relaxed bodies and the language of comfort that underpinned it. It argues that being attentive to men's dress allows us to engage with a reframing of attractive, able, white, heterosexual bodies that combined two icons of Australian masculinity – the Anzac and the athlete – into a more relaxed vision of manliness.     

Selling Paradise and Adventure: Representations of Landscape in the Tourist Advertising

The representation of Australia is explored in the visual and verbal texts of the Australian Tourist Commission's 1992 international advertising campaigns. The advertisements employed representations of Australian landscape to signify tourists' desires for either paradise or adventure. By providing the potential visitor with a range of cultural tools enabling the construction of fantasy, meaning, and identity, these advertisements attempt to attract international tourists. My critical reading suggests that these representations of landscape help maintain a myth of Australian national identity originating from oppressive colonial and patriarchal relations. These representations are not only regressive but conflict with articulations of national identity emanating from other Australian institutions.     

Clothing Economy and Clothing Culture: The Farm Wardrobe from a Gendered Perspective in Nineteenth-Century Sweden

This article examines the clothing of landowning farmers in inland Swedish from a gendered perspective during industrialisation in the nineteenth century. It considers clothes as possessions and goods within a European framework of trade and influence. In particular, it shows how clothing was a means of expression that changed during the course of industrialisation and how gender became an important factor in the supply and making of clothes. In the region examined, clothing changed from being a local fashion, characterised by similarities in material and workmanship between men's and women's clothes, to become a part of fashion in general with its emphasis on differences between men's and women's wardrobes. In the early nineteenth century, the female wardrobe accounted for a higher value as it included a greater share of garments made of manufactured fabrics. In late nineteenth century, when industrial forestry had replaced livestock farming as the main source of income in the area, men's wardrobes grew in value due to increased demand for tailor-made garments and purchased fabrics. By contrast, women's garments were often made of simpler fabrics and sewn by seamstresses. These changes responded to the growing breadwinner–homemaker ideal and to national-romantic ideas about folk costume – two tendencies that emphasised female domesticity and home-woven fabrics.     

Grub Street Commerce: Advertisements and Politics in the Early Modern British Press

I n mid-May 1689 James Welwood, Scottish-born physician and polemicist for the dual monarchs William III and Mary II, inaugurated a popular journal of opinion, Mercurius Reformatus or the New Observator. Dr. Welwood's periodical was only one among the dozens of newspapers and mercuries that Londoners read after the Glorious Revolution of 1688, the culmination of events that removed James II, a Roman Catholic, from the throne and replaced him with his Protestant elder daughter Mary and her Dutch husband-first cousin, William of Orange. While "mercury," an allusion to the Roman god of information, eloquence, and wit, was a common publishing appellation, Welwood viewed his periodical as unique, embracing historical as well as contemporary events, and therefore superior to any ordinary newspaper. He also considered himself exceptional. Admittedly, not many political writers had Welwood's admirable credentials: multiple university degrees, familiarity with the court of William and Mary as a royal physician, and active service in medicine on reform-minded wartime commissions. Although Dr. Welwood never affixed his name to the masthead of Mercurius Reformatus , believing that journalism was beneath his professional standing, his reportorial legacy is significant. Moreover, beyond the columns in Mercurius Reformatus , its companion advertisements yield a valuable archive of remarkable particulars about the views of its founder and the audience it reached. During his publication's two-and-a-half-year run, Welwood used the advertisements to reinforce his articles in order to promote his own political, religious, and medical convictions.¹     

Clothing the Poor in Early-Nineteenth-Century England

Abstract

In a pioneering study in this journal, Steven King suggested that parish clothing provision was of fundamental importance in the eighteenth century both in terms of local social relations and the perceived standing of parish authorities. This article tests his thesis for the first decades of the nineteenth century, confirming that parish clothing was indeed pivotal in maintaining a sense of local social justice. However, it takes issue with King's reasons for the relatively high levels of clothing provision enjoyed by the poor, suggesting that they had as much to do with a set of shared values between giver and receiver as they did with considerations of parish prestige or social order.     

盐务改革背景下的1930年代蚌埠"北盐公共营业处"案

南京国民政府前期,两淮盐课乃中央财政收入之大宗.随着晚清以降淮南盐场的衰败,淮北盐业地位日重.皖北、豫东向为淮北盐的重要销岸,津浦铁路通车后,蚌埠迅速成为区域盐业中心.在中央政府强化盐权的同时,安徽省政府除直接干预外,受其颁发牙帖庇护,具有强行居中销售、评秤、抽佣等特权的盐行迅速扩张.这既影响中央税收,又与市场化名义的法律文本相惇.故而盐务机构与运商暗中联合,在蚌埠设立标榜"自由买卖"的"北盐公共营业处",此举与省财政及盐行利益相冲突,引发系列抗争.在平衡双方利益后,新机构的部分功能得以推行.但仅过数月,中央饬令安徽废除盐牙.在省财政"损失"得到弥补后,盐行被"牺牲".然而,相关制度安排却进一步导致商民疲敝、盐税陡增、盐价上涨,与改革口号背道而驰,根本上还是为了更大限度增加中央财政收入.     

Selling the world city: A comparison of promotional strategies in Paris and London

Within the globalization process which creaks new common imperatives for cities, it is felt that cities are developing similar promotional approaches. Drawing on two case studies of the promotional strategies and institutions of Paris and London, this paper investigates the balance between economic and purely non‐economic factors in shaping these capitals’ responses to global pressure. The cities’ responses are found to be shaped by national and local factors (institutional, political, cultural) rather than economic ones. Two types of strategies and actors can be outlined, London bang more aggressive and flexible than Paris. Lastly, the report highlights the emergence of new types of institutions within the capitals.     

Unravelling the Relationships between Used‐Clothing Imports and the Decline of African Clothing Industries

African clothing industries have declined since the implementation of economic liberalization policies in the early 1980s whilst used‐clothing imports to Africa have increased. The general effects of economic liberalization on African clothing industries are well documented, although little research has been conducted on the particular impact of increased imports of second‐hand clothes on the local manufacturing sectors. Whether these two processes are causally related is difficult to determine due to limitations in official data sets. In this article, the used‐clothing trade is explored in detail and a broad range of cultural and local economic processes are investigated. Trends such as declining local purchasing power and the opening of African markets to cheap new clothing imports, as well as imports of used‐clothing, are examined, along with the converse boost to African clothing export production resulting from preferential trade agreements in the 2000s. With respect to the differential legal and illegal imports of second‐hand clothing to selected African countries, it is demonstrated that official trade data sets often fail to capture the nuances of contemporary social and economic processes.     

Representation and Recursion in the Archaeological Record

Living humans are unique among the animal kingdom with respect to their ability to externalize mental representations outside the brain through a variety of media and in a recursive or creative manner (i.e., generating a potentially infinite array of combinations). Earlier humans evolved two specialized organs—the hand and the vocal tract—as primary instruments for externalizing artificial or semantic representations. These organs and the externalized representations may have co-evolved with the Homo brain. The archaeological record yields examples of simple representations by 1.6 mya. More complex, hierarchical, and recursive forms are evident by roughly 0.25 mya. Complex and highly recursive representations in a wide range of media (including representations of representations in the form of visual art) emerge after 0.1 mya among anatomically modern humans.