Historical Contingency and the Peace Progressives

Robert David Johnson. The Peace Progressives and American Foreign Relations . Cambridge: Harvard University Press.     

《长短经》所引《宋略》史论的文献价值

唐人赵蕤所撰《长短经》引有《宋略》史论七则 ,其中两则因不见于它书而可资辑佚 ,另外五则可补正《建康实录》及《资治通鉴》等所引《宋略》史论之讹脱数十处 ,故文献价值极高     

春秋战国时期史官职责与史学传统

在春秋战国时期,史官们承担着诸多方面的职责,他们所承担的职责,与巫、祝、卜职责有一定的联系,但也有根本性的区别,要注意其中的“异中之同”和“同中之异”。春秋战国时期是中国史学传统开创的重要时期,而许多史学传统的开创,与此时期史官所任职责及其为履行职责所做出的努力,有密切的关系。     

Communications Revolutions: A Historiographical Concept

This essay explores the origins and the development of a ‘communicationsrevolution’, which would give rise to a new concept withinhistoriography. It proposes that the Communications Revolutioncan be explained as a macrohistorical process, comparable tothe Scientific Revolution and the Industrial Revolution, whichhave both had permanent and irreversible consequences in themodern era. The communications revolution, like the other two,began in the early modern era, and is still ongoing. The conceptof a Communications Revolution encompasses smaller ‘mediarevolutions’, more easily ascribed to a specific historicalperiod, and to a large extent mutually interrelated and dependent.The development of postal services gave rise to a new understandingof space and time, and it is this development that the essayidentifies as the mainspring of change in the communicationsrevolution. Postal services enabled faster movements of people,goods, and information. The new medium of the printed book,newspaper or sheet magnified the effects of this faster disseminationof information and news. So the Communications Revolution canbe argued to have been the motor that enabled the constructionof the infrastructure of the modern world, newspapers, cartography,and the ‘public sphere’ of politics, of warfareand diplomacy. Indeed, there is scope for discussion as to whetherit was in fact the Communications Revolution which may haveopened the way for both the Scientific Revolution and the IndustrialRevolution.     

Historiographical perspectives on 1940s Futurism

The 1940s are undoubtedly the years most neglected by scholars of Futurism. This essay examines critical responses to the period over the last fifty years, considering how the failure to engage with it reflects a more general – and surprisingly persistent – belief that to all intents and purposes Futurism ended in 1915. It also notes how this phase has been considered beyond redemption, politically speaking, as a result of the movement's enduring support for Fascism in its most brutal and destructive years, and artistically substandard as a consequence of its readiness to produce works of explicit propaganda in an easily accessible, figurative vocabulary. However, the essay argues that the 1940s cannot truly be said to reveal a rupture in the ideology and art of Futurism – which had long celebrated war and violence, and which resists purely formalist interpretation. Moreover, this concluding period might even be said to have witnessed a reawakening of the movement's original visionary spirit, engendered by the fragmentation and collapse of both Mussolini's regime and the industrialized Italy celebrated by Futurist artists and poets for more than thirty years.     

Historiographical Myth,Discipline, and Contextual Distortion

Summary

Although academic disciplines are given to mythologising their own histories, corrective historicisation is no straightforward matter. Anachronisms are most difficult to avoid where our own tacit understandings of the world are used to help structure contexts that are themselves often unstable and indeterminate. This is often the case in attempts to relate agents and propositions to a context of pre-existing problems. Propositions and concepts that are the result of satiric reduction, or unintended consequence, disrupt narrative sequences that lead directly and neatly to present disciplinary identities.     

“食货派”的史学理论与方法

食货派的史学理论与方法具有自己的特色,具体表现如下:接近唯物史观,却不是唯物史观的社会史观;从探寻中国社会形态的演变到新经学的研究旨趣;重视史料但不忽视理论的治史主张;倡导分工合作的治史路径等。他们的史学思想对推动社会史论战之后学风的转变起了一定作用,在四十年代中后期也一度产生了积极影响。但抗战爆发以后,食货派未能从史学发展中去理解和把握学术研究的本质要求,没有对唯物史观认真总结,致使其史学思想黯然失色。     

Introduction: Religion and Empire,an Historiographical Perspective*

The relations between empires and Christianity have been the subject of considerable historiographical attention and it is the object of this paper to review the major issues in this recent literature to provide a context for the specialised papers which follow. Major issues on which discussion is focussed include the extent to which missionaries can be said to be agents of empire, the significance of missionary critique of imperial practice and the extent to which missionary activity was a form of “cultural imperialism.” Examples are chosen chiefly from the British Empire but there is also some comparative material drawn from the history of the Roman, Spanish, and French empires.     

Historiographical layers in the relationship between science and technology

Abstract

This paper aims to examine historiographical layers in the historical narrative on the relationship between science and technology, a topic which has been exhaustively discussed without consensus by both historians of science and technology. I will first examine two extreme positions concerning this issue, and analyze the underlying historiographical standpoints behind them. I will then show that drawing implications for the relationship between science and technology from a few case studies is frequently misleading. After showing this, I .will move to the “macrohistory” of the relationship between science and technology, which reveals a long process in which the barriers between them gradually became porous. Here, I will examine the historical formation of three different kinds of “boundary objects” between science and technology, which facilitated their interactions by making their borders more permeable: instruments as a material boundary object; new institutions, laboratories, and departments as a spatial boundary or boundary space; and new mediators as a human hybrid.     

Espionage and Near Eastern Archaeology: A Historiographical Survey

Abstract

Between c. 1850 and the end of World War II several key figures of Near Eastern archaeology worked as spies, informers and intelligence operatives for their respective governments. They lent their expert knowledge of Middle Eastern culture, traditions, geography, language and history to the political needs of their governments, creating a lasting legacy. This preliminary survey explores the actions of some of these scholars and discusses their motives and their legacy, in order to interrogate the involvement of archaeologists and anthropologists in the current day politics of the Middle East.     

历史语境、史学语境与史料的解读——以弗吉尼亚州批准美国宪法大会中一条材料的解读为例

"语境主义"意识对于历史研究具有重要的意义。历史学家在解读具体的史料时,只有清楚而准确地把握史料产生的"历史语境",以及由相关研究构成的"史学语境",才有可能探明史料的"原意",进而恰当地运用史料。     

马其昶《桐城耆旧传》的史学价值

马其昶的《桐城耆旧传》记叙上起明初、下迄清末桐城地方人物九百余。《桐城耆旧传》征引文献广泛,主要有《明史》、《桐城县志》、传主文集、谱牒、墓志,以及口述史料和个人见闻等。其学术旨趣就是通过记叙乡贤的事迹,重建以程朱理学为行为准则的乡村社会,总结人才之盛与天下兴亡息息相关的历史经验;同时重视地方学术流变,维护理学正统。该书为人们研究明清时期桐城历史文化提供了宝贵的史料。