毛泽东无法叫停为自己塑像

新中国成立初期,有些省、市召开的各界人民代表会议和后来召开的人民代表大会,多次提出为毛泽东树立大铜像或授予毛泽东最高荣誉勋章等提案,均被毛泽东回绝。     

万牲园史考

本文主要从北京动物园的前身———万牲园的筹建始末、历史沿革等几方面,考证了万牲园于清末光绪帝实行新政时开始兴建,到后来的国衰与衰和新中国成立后国兴与兴的发展轨迹。     

为什么新四军只出了一位元帅

新中国十大元帅中,有八路军系统中的9位,而新四军系统中只有一位。同样是在中国共产党领导下的武装力量,为何会如此悬殊?毛泽东、刘少奇、周恩来、邓小平在授衔的初步方案中都曾为大元帅、元帅,后来为何都未授衔?《为什么新四军只出一位元帅》一文中,细述了其中缘由。     

父亲家世

父亲熊向晖（中共情报工作“后三杰”之首,为保卫中共中央作出了突出贡献。新中国成立后,历任中央调查部副部长、中央统战部副部长兼中国人民外交学会副会长、中国国际信托投资公司党组书记兼副董事长——编者）,祖籍安徽风阳。据父亲讲,凤阳熊氏乃明朝初年从江西搬来,后来成为大族,住的是个几代同堂的大院。     

解放初期中共对新疆政策

建立新中国前后,中国共产党对新疆这个特殊的少数民族地区采取了一系列谨慎科学的政策,确保了新疆地区的和平解放,及其后来在政治经济上的平稳发展,尤其对民族宗教问题采取了极为审慎的态度和方法。所有这些政策措施都十分有力地维护了当时的社会稳定,民族团结和祖国统一。     

中央人民政府政务院述论

新中国成立之初的政务院与后来的国务院在性质和地位方面有着重要区别,其本身并不构成中央人民政府,不是国家最高行政机关,只是国家政务的最高执行机关。当时,政务院在人员和机构组成、权力配置和运作、党政关系的处理方面经历了一个曲折的发展过程,具有明显的初创特点和探索性质。     

建国以来晋察冀抗日根据地史研究概述

晋察冀抗日根据地是中国共产党领导的八路军在敌后创建的第一个根据地,当时被誉为“敌后模范的抗日根据地及统一战线的模范区”。它的创立、巩固和发展,对坚持华北敌后抗战和全国持久抗战起了“坚强堡垒”的作用;对战略反攻及配合苏联红军作战、收复东北失地起了“前进阵地”的作用;为中国抗日战争和世界反法西斯战争的胜利做出了重要贡献,也为后来新中国的建设提供了宝贵的经验。     

《开国公告》有两个版本

1949年10月1日的开国大典上,新当选的中华人民共和国中央人民政府主席毛泽东在天安门城楼上庄严宣读了《中华人民共和国中央人民政府公告》,这一公告是新中国成立第一天公布的,所以被后来的史学界称为《开国公告》。     

青年彭德怀在湖南新军的一次历险

新中国成立后,彭德怀元帅曾回忆起他在湖南新军时的一段往事,感慨地说：“我年轻时受社会上那些行侠仗义者的搞法的影响,立志打富济贫,为穷人做些好事。后来去了湖南新军,置身于下层军官和士兵的生活之中。在那里,我组织一些穷苦的下层士兵杀地主恶霸,就是这种搞法。     

大地震中诞生的歌曲

1966年5月8日5时29分,里氏6．8级地震突袭邢台,从5月8日到29日这21天的时间里,邢台地区共发生了5次6级以上的地震、后来专家们把这一地震群统称为邢台大地震。这是新中国成立以来第一次发生在平原人口稠密地区、持续时间长、破坏严重、伤亡惨重的强烈地震灾害。     

Mediating legacies of empire in the post-imperial museum

ABSTRACT

Throughout the Balkans, the history museum remains a crucial site where memories of an imperial past are molded, rationalized, and integrated into the wider arc of nationalist narratives about a country and its people. The legacy of the Ottoman Empire is particularly fraught in Greece, where this period is almost always classified as ‘post-Byzantine’ within the context of government institutions. In this paper, I set out to trace the legacy of the Ottoman Empire as it has been mediated in multiple museum sites throughout the country. I will primarily focus on two case studies: The National Historical Museum in Athens and the Museum of Ali Pasha and the Period of Revolution in Ioannina. Comparing these two sites and their practices of display bring into sharper focus the dynamics of how historical memory plays out in a central versus regional sphere of belonging and identity.     

Educational Innovation and the Market for Geographers in Hungary

This paper examines the status of geography in higher education in Hungary. Stress is placed on reforms begun in the 1990s to launch new curricula for training professional geographers. The authors played an important role in developing this new curriculum by introducing new subjects into geography programmes, working out the scope and sequence of courses, obtaining accreditation and carrying out market research for graduates. The project was motivated by a decline in demand for geography and geography teachers in secondary schools accompanied by an increase in demand for geographers trained to work in public administration, government and business. The graduates of the new professional geographer curriculum receive a practice-oriented education designed to cultivate their spatial problem solving and applied geographical skills. In this paper the authors present the steps in the curriculum reform and suggest that it may serve as a model for reform in a number of nearby countries planning to join the EU.     

The hidden rationality of Sweden's policy of neutrality during the Cold War

The long-dominant view of Swedish neutrality policy during the Cold War holds that it aimed to reduce tension in peacetime and to keep the country out of a new major war. The main dissenting view is that the policy primarily served peacetime purposes, including domestic politics, and that it would not have worked in a war. Sweden would then either have been attacked by the USSR because it was a Western country in its path of attack, or it would have been drawn in on the allied side because of its cooperation with the West, including tolerating overflights by allied bombers. This article presents a third perspective, namely that Sweden's leaders in the 1950s understood that neutrality would probably fail in wartime, but that they aimed to stay out of the violent initial nuclear exchange. This conclusion is supported by evidence hitherto overlooked in the existing research.     

Vancouver island in the empire

Colonised by sea from the British Isles half a century before it became a part of Canada in 1871, Vancouver Island is best understood as part of a worldwide system of island bases that included Aden, Bombay, Cyprus, Gibraltar, Hong Kong, Malta, St Helena, Sydney and Trincomalee (Ceylon). Its character was formed by the Royal Navy as it moved into the Pacific and by other imperial personnel attracted by reports of cheap land in a picturesque landscape, good fishing and hunting, and a British civilisation. Surprising numbers of British officers and civil servants arrived from India and China as well as Britain. Historians from east of the Rockies, busy writing the Empire out of Canadian history, tend to approach the Island's history through an ideological cloud of nationalism. The result has been an unfortunate distortion of Vancouver Island's imperial past.     

Illustrating the Phaenomena: Celestial Cartography in Antiquity and the Middle Ages

Abstract

The Ordnance Survey's Boundary Survey, carried out between 1841 and 1888, was a major undertaking which resulted in the local administrative boundaries of the whole of Great Britain being reliably mapped for the first time. This was not achieved by imposition but by the use of local knowledge of boundaries, thus making permanent a communal memory of administrative geography and rendering it globally accessible through maps. The Boundary Survey aided the reform of local government areas, a process which started during the same period and provided derived data for the burgeoning collection of statistics in the nineteenth century.     

The Absence of the Establishing Shot in Slovak Films of the 1960s

Abstract

This article asks why several Czech and Slovak directors of the 1960s employed what might be referred to as a non-establishing-shot technique. To state that the employment of this technique was a reaction to Socialist Realism and to a Socialist society leaves unanswered the question of ‘how’ this reaction against the collectivization of the characters and the stories carried out under the aesthetics of Socialist Realism was expressed. More significantly, it was a reaction against the forced collectivization of society under the Communist regime. The absence of the establishing shot was a means of returning individuality, uniqueness and differences to characters. It was a way of stating that a society is formed by the sum of its parts, that is, its individual members. This article deals mainly with the Slovak side of the New Wave, hitherto neglected by western scholars. It asks why and how five directors (Stefan Uher, Peter Solan, Juraj Jakubisko, Du?an Hanák and Alain Robbe-Grillet) made use of the non-establishing-shot technique; how they developed the technique; and in what ways they used it in a different manner to their Czech counterparts.     

Bad news from an aberrant city: a critical analysis of the British press's portrayal of organised crime and the refuse crisis in Naples

This article examines the coverage of Naples since 2000 in the Guardian and the Independent, paying particular attention to their portrayal of the Camorra and the refuse crisis. It argues that this coverage was not simply riddled with stereotypes but was also characterised by significant inaccuracies and omissions. Analysts in Italy have detailed how the trash emergency in 2008 was the outcome of corporate malpractice and institutional complicity and that organised crime, although intent on exploiting the situation, was not a determining factor. The British press, instead, tended to conflate the breakdown of the urban waste cycle with the dumping of toxic waste and, by inverting cause and effect, to point the blame at the Camorra. These accounts, it is argued, are partially explained by the very nature of foreign news that seeks out dramatic and clear-cut stories for an otherwise disinterested audience. They also reflect the heightened interest in the Camorra following the Secondigliano War and the English translation of Roberto Saviano's Gomorrah. However, the article suggests that it is the press's assumption that Naples is already an ‘out of the ordinary’ urban setting that ultimately precludes the possibility of an informed coverage of the city and its predicaments.     

Beyond the Anthropocene: Defining the Age of Destruction

The question of the Anthropocene has gained increased notoriety among archaeologists recently. Precisely because of that, it is in need of thorough critique. The aim of this article is not to rule out the concept of Anthropocene, but to point out some of its problems: the relationship of Anthropocenic discourses with the emergence of an all-embracing biopolitical science; the inadequacies of the term, which blames all humans equally for a specific effect of modernity and capitalism; its failure to accept a diversity of origins (but also the problem of accepting overly deep origins), and the shortcomings of adopting a geological framework for archaeology. I thus suggest that the discipline has to define its own eras – also for the contemporary period – and that the Age of Destruction could be an apt archaeological counterpart for the Anthropocene. One of the benefits of outlining an archaeological era is that it brings modernity and capitalism back to the fore, and with them issues of power and conflict that have been largely lost in recent post-anthropocentric debates.     

中国现代化进程中的生态困境

中国在建设社会主义现代化的进程中,对环境保护做了很多有益的尝试,但依然而临着严峻的生态困境。各种类型的自然灾害、重大环境污染和生态破坏事件频发;随着城市化进程的不断加快,城市所面临的环境危机也日益凸显;环境保护的政策与治理虽有改进,但进展缓慢,中国生态恢复和环境保护的前景不容乐观。为此,必须转变经济发展方式,实现经济、社会和环境的协调发展。     

1932: A Neglected Date in the History of the Decline of the British Liberal Party

There is an historical consensus that the decline of the BritishLiberal Party, whenever it began, was essentially complete by1929 or 1931 at the latest. This article suggests that the possibilityof a Liberal revival still existed in the early 1930s, but thatit was thwarted by the formalization of divisions between Liberalsand Liberal Nationals which took place in 1932. These divisionswere not accidental, but the result of clear calculations onthe part of the Liberal National leadership. It is further arguedthat the events of this year were important in determining theelectoral politics of the following three decades—dominationby a Conservative party which set out to stress its ‘liberal’credentials and to persuade the electorate that it was the logicalrepository for the country's still significant ‘Liberalvote’. Meanwhile, an independent Liberal Party survived,but one which was far smaller and less electorally powerfulthan might have been the case if the party had remained united.