近代中国大学史学教授群像

就教育背景来看,近代中国大学的史学教授略可分为三代。第一代为科举时代的人,第二代为新式学堂或学校教育时代的人,第三代为大学教育发展时代的人。从数量来看,第三代占了近85%,是史学教授群体最主要的构成部分;但就影响而言,第一代和后两代之间,以及第二代和第三代之间,往往存在学术传承关系,因此前两代的重要性绝不可忽视。第三代史学教授,大部分出自北大、清华、燕京等少数几所大学,其中超过半数又曾在国外大学或研究院(所)接受过教育。尽管当时教授流动极为频繁,对各大学都产生了冲击,但北大等少数大学的史学科系依然在一定程度上保持着师资阵容的相对稳定,这就使得它们能够巩固其地位和影响。至于本国史教授与外国史教授势力之悬殊,以及许多留学生回国后改治国史,除了因为在国内缺乏研究外国史的条件等客观原因外,更重要的,还是因为许多人其实在主观上更重视本国文化历史的研究。     

Women in Mangaian Society: A Historical Portrait

This article investigates commonly held assumptions about the subordinate place of women in Mangaian society before the arrival of Christianity. In a review of the available evidence from Mangaia and elsewhere in Polynesia, this paper suggests that suitably selected and trained women in a society such as pre-contact Mangaia could fill certain important positions as priestly experts and tribal historians. Mangaian women were also fearless warriors and resolute in saving the lives of family members and other connections, suggesting that they held a respected place within the ancestral social order of Mangaia.     

‘There Is Graite Odds between A Mans being At Home And A Broad’: Deborah Read Franklin and the Eighteenth‐Century Home

From 1764 to her death in 1774, Deborah Franklin lived in ‘their’ new house without husband Benjamin. The correspondence between them reveals several ambiguously gendered constructions of that house – ideologically, materially, and architecturally. Deborah was ‘homeless’ legally and conceptually. Her household variously consisted of her mother, her adopted son, her daughter, relatives, guests, boarders and servants – she permanently assumed the role of head of the household. His household consisted of his landlady, Widow Margaret Stevenson, and her daughter Polly – he could not assume his role as head of household. Moreover, as Deborah wrote to her husband about turning the house into a fortress during a raid on it during Stamp Act crisis, he wrote to her about the household goods; as she talked about politics, he discussed familial matters. Their permeable, even ambiguous, masculine and feminine roles reconstructed the meaning – and thereby symbolised the gendered complexity – of the early American white middling and elite eighteenth‐century home.     

Exile and the Demos: Leo Strauss in America

This article explores the political, as opposed to the philosophical, impact of Leo Strauss’s exile in America on his thought. After a consideration of anti-Semitism and the importance Strauss attached to being a Jew, I argue that the fact that in America he no longer wrote in his Muttersprache but in English was central to his becoming a political theorist rather than a philosopher. Whereas as a philosopher he was unable to speak to the demos, as a political theorist what he needed was a group of “rhetors” who would carry a particular message to the demos.