The Perils of the Back Seat: Date Rape,Race and Gender in 1950s America

Dating among white American teenagers in the 1950s caused parents considerable concern, as it represented disturbing developments in sexual expectations. While the rhetoric surrounding marriage celebrated traditional gender roles and monogamy, Americans bemoaned social and moral decay, caused in part by women's encroachment on male prerogatives. Sexual experience for boys increasingly became a defining gender characteristic and a means of achieving manhood as well. Ideas about proper marital norms and studies of dating practices among young people naturalised male aggression as proof of masculinity, which made girls, even ‘respectable ones’, vulnerable to violence from their dates. As teens' acceptance of going steady became more widespread, older racialised narratives of sexual danger evolved to incorporate new dating trends. Whereas American, and especially southern white, women knew the dangers of the supposed ‘black beast rapist’, they learnt during the 1950s that a special danger could confront them in the back seat of cars, despite the presence of their white, male date. Even with a white protector, white women remained vulnerable to violence on dates, whether from black men or from their white date. As dating conventions loosened, white women found that that the perils of the back seat only increased.     

Godliness,Sex and Propaganda: Gender in the Confessional Age

Books reviewed in this article: Kenneth Charlton, Women, Religion and Education in Early Modern England Frances E. Dolan, Whores of Babylon: Catholicism, Gender and Seventeenth–Century Print Culture Marilyn J. Westerkamp, Women and Religion in Early America 1600–1850: The Puritan and Evangelical Traditions Merry E. Wiesner–Hanks, Christianity and Sexuality in the Early Modern World: Regulating Desire, Reforming Practice     

20世纪五六十年代中国史学的基本走向

20世纪已经结束了。 2 0世纪的中国发生了天翻地覆的巨大变化。2 0世纪的中国史学同样经历了急剧的演变。在跨入新世纪的时刻 ,为了更好地推动中国史学的发展 ,我们很有必要认真地总结和反思它在 2 0世纪的发展。大家都承认 ,2 0世纪的中国史学取得了重大的成就 ,同时也存在许多问题。在学界中对这些成就和问题至今存在着不同的看法 ,这本是很正常的现象。重要的是 ,我们应该通过不同意见的交流和切磋来加深我们的认识 ,更好地进行总结和反思 ,从而促使我国的史学在新世纪发展得更快更健康。这就是本刊举办这次学术讨论的目的。应该说明的是 :一 ,这次学术讨论的题目和范围是 2 0世纪中国史学的发展 ,重点是 1 94 9年新中国成立以后。二 ,讨论的重点是对 2 0世纪的中国史学或其中的某个阶段 ,或某个学派 ,某个学术思潮 ,某个史学分支 ,某个重大专题 ,某个史学领域 ,某种重要现象等从总体上进行观察和评述。一般不对某个具体学者进行讨论和评述。三 ,讨论必须坚持“百花齐放 ,百家争鸣”的方针。欢迎发表各种不同意见 ,进行平等的讨论。四 ,讨论中的任何意见均不代表编辑部的看法。文责均由作者自负。     

Snapshots of Tibet:Lhasa in the 1950s

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The New Militia: War,Politics and Gender in 1750s Britain

This article explores the role of gender in the debates around the creation of a ‘New Militia’ at the beginning of the Seven Years War. The humiliating military defeats of 1756 had precipitated a cultural crisis that focused upon gender distinctions, as the ‘effeminacy’ of men and the ‘boldness’ of women threatened to collapse the social order. In this context, militia service was presented as a cure for the nation's moral, social, political and sexual ills. This article therefore examines a range of textual and visual sources in order to suggest that certain mid‐Georgian political worldviews were fundamentally gendered, since they were predicated upon martial masculine virtues of the citizenry.     

20世纪五六十年代中苏双方对黑龙江流域的合作考察

新中国成立后,中央政府十分重视对科学研究的规划,科学事业逐步纳入了有计划进行的轨道。1956年初,中共中央制定《1956～1967年全国农业发展纲要(草案)》后,推动了各方面着手制定12年发展远景规划。国务院组织了几百名科学工作者着手制定《1956～1967年科学技术发展远景规划(修正草案)》(以下简称12年远景规划)。这个规划,成为当时中国科学技术发展的指导性纲领。     

Introduction: Gender Interventions in Research,Teaching and Practice

This study investigates the counter-intuitive observation that older students tend to thrive better than younger students in online classes. We use a variety of measures to compare performance and attitudes of undergraduates and continuing adult professionals in separate but nearly identical class sections led by the same instructor at a US university during the same nine-month study period. Findings are consistent with theoretical predictions about differences in readiness of younger and older adults for self-directed learning experiences. Results also suggest that online educators should be proactive in stimulating younger students' participation in class discussions, and should find ways to evaluate explicitly the tacit learning that online discussion can foster.     

Two places and three times: fragments retrieved of India and Australia in the 1950s, 1960s and 1980s.

This article uses memory and specifically my memories to build up a sense of how Australians perceived India in the second half of the 20th century. I focus first on the late 1950s to consider Australian perceptions of India as seen through my eyes as a university student. I then present my observations as a student studying in India in the first half of the 1960s to track the limited awareness of Australia in India. The final section, based mainly on newspaper clippings of the late 1980s, assesses how India featured in Australian perceptions some two decades on and in the very different world of the day – one that was much more knowledgeable but not necessarily significantly more involved.     

The Charms of Women and Priests: Sex,Magic, Gender and Public Order in Late Medieval Italy

How did judicial authorities in late medieval Italy understand the relationship between gender, sexuality, social status, magic and public order, especially when magic was used to facilitate the crime of adultery? What might this reveal about the intersection of gender, magic and public order in a place and time so fraught with political and social tensions? This study qualitatively compares four love‐magic trials from fourteenth‐century Lucca and suggests that the anxieties underpinning these trials were both particular to late medieval Italian communes and projected onto two populations, women and priests, whose unchecked sexuality posed the greatest threat to civic order. Historians examining gender in medieval European magic trials have often treated judicial officials’ anxieties as portents of the ‘witch craze’ of early modern Europe. Historians of medieval Lucca have tended to treat the political and gender histories of the city as largely separate. This article suggests that the courts’ increasing regulation of gender and sexuality in late medieval Lucca reflected larger ecclesiastical and communal concerns about the dissolution of civic order. In a world of civic power that increasingly belonged to secular men, the unchecked sexuality of women and clergy represented a dual threat to the stability of the family and, by extension, the city. This article argues that secular and ecclesiastical judicial officials feared not magic itself, but the ability of magic to invert power relations between men and women and between clergy and laity, destroying public order.     

The Local Shape of Revolution: Reflections on Quantitative Geography at Cambridge in the 1950s and 1960s

The "quantitative revolution" in human geography which swept across so many universities in the 1950s and 1960s had its main diffusion centers in a few locations which were to have global significance. Two critical early centers were the University of Washington in the Pacific Northwest and Lund University in southern Sweden. But the experience of change was different in different locations as the general forces of perturbation sweeping around academia were translated into local eddies with local repercussions. Here, small and somewhat random quirks at the outset, led eventually to fundamental divergences between adoption and rejection. The theme is illustrated by reference to changes which occurred at Cambridge, one of England's two oldest universities, as seen from the perspective of someone who—as undergraduate, graduate student, and later, faculty member—was caught up in these changes and took some small part in propagating them. Special attention is given to the role of two environmental scientists, Vaughan Lewis and Richard Chorley, in introducing changes and the way in which later developments in human geography drew on preceding experiences in physical geography. The reasons behind the "Cambridge variant" and the questions of how intellectual DNA is passed across the generations are discussed.     

Cancer, quackery and the vernacular meanings of hope in 1950s America

Hope was central to cancer control in twentieth-century America. Physicians placed great store in its power to persuade people to seek medical help as early as possible in the development of the disease, when it was most amenable to treatment; to maintain patients' loyalty through what could be a long, painful and uncertain course of therapy; and to encourage doubts about alternative healers. Some also argued that hope could have beneficial therapeutic and psychological effects for patients. However, we know very little about its meanings for the public. Focusing on a large collection of letters written to the Food and Drug Administration in the 1950s concerning an anti-quackery campaign, this article explores how men and women responded to the competing messages of hope promoted by orthodox cancer organizations and by alternative healers. It asks: What did hope mean to such men and women? How did they construct this meaning? How did they decide which treatments were hopeful and which were not? And, how did they use hope to imagine the social world of cancer? In short, this article explores the vernacular meanings, epistemologies, and imaginative uses of hope among Americans in the mid-twentieth century.     

20世纪50年代基本建设投资的前提和结构

20世纪50年代,我国内地基本建设投资的前提是:生产力水平低下,人均产值低;资金紧缺,但资产相对集中;西方国家对我国实行经济封锁;我国确立了优先发展重工业的工业化方针.通过对我国经济建设投资的产业结构、区域布局、项目结构、主体结构的分析,我们可以得到几点启示:投资管理体制的变化要适应生产力发展的要求;建设规模不能超过国力许可的范围,急于求成必将适得其反;综合平衡应从短线出发.