Caracol,Belize, and Changing Perceptions of Ancient Maya Society

Archaeological research at Caracol, an ancient Maya site that was rediscovered in 1937, has become a major resource in the interpretation and understanding of the ancient Maya. Caracol, in west-central Belize, is situated in a subtropical region once characterized as being unsuitable for the development or maintenance of complex societies, yet it is one of the largest, if not the largest Classic period Maya site in the southern Maya Lowlands, home to over 100,000 people at its height between AD 600 and 700. The investigations at Caracol underscore the utility of long-term archaeological projects incorporating large-scale settlement study that combine excavation with varied research designs and the use of a contextual approach. By employing Maya epigraphic history, traditional archaeology, and modern technology like LiDAR, research at Caracol details the rise, maintenance, and fall of an ancient Maya city, affording a large window into ancient Maya lifeways. Archaeological work provides evidence of sustainable agriculture, a market economy, city planning that included a road system, the impact of warfare on the site’s inhabitants, the sociopolitical status of women, the role that archaeology can play in refining written history, and the significance of commemorating the cyclical passage of time to the ancient Maya. This article summarizes archaeological research efforts at the site by the Caracol Archaeological Project over the last three decades.     

Retrieving the Partisan History of Australian Citizenship

Current debates on Australian citizenship overlook its partisan dimension. Until very recently, the term citizenship fitted more comfortably into nonlabour's discourse than into Labor's. Nonlabour's understanding of citizenship is embedded in Australia's constitutional framework. As well, in the first half of the century the term was as much moral as political, concerned not so much with the rights and entitlements which dominate contemporary understandings but with individuals' duties and obligations to their fellow citizens. For nonlabour, citizenship was linked to ideas of service and the national interest, and explicitly opposed to Labor's commitment to sectional, class-based interests. This conception of citizenship was realised in the meeting procedures of voluntary associations in which there was a clear line of implication from the government of the self through the government of the community to the government of the nation. The working man is not merely a working man, nor can all his interests be subsumed (classed) under the term Labour. The working man is and knows himself to be, the citizen of a great State. ( The Liberal 2 December 1912, 114)     

Gendering the History of Women's Healthcare

This essay examines the genesis and continuing influence of certain core narratives in the history of western women's healthcare. Some derive from first‐wave feminism's search for models of female medical practice, an agenda that paid little attention to historical context. Second‐wave feminism, identifying a rift between pre‐modern and modern times in terms of women's medical practices, saw the pre‐modern European female healer as an exceptionally knowledgeable empiricist, uniquely responsible for women's healthcare and (particularly because of her knowledge of mechanisms to limit fertility) a victim of male persecution. Aspects of this second narrative continue subtly to effect scholarly discourse and research agendas on the history of healthcare both by and for women. This essay argues that, by seeing medical knowledge as a cultural product – something that is not static but continually re‐created and sometimes contested – we can create an epistemology of how such knowledge is gendered in its genesis, dissemination and implementation. Non‐western narratives drawn from history and medical anthropology are employed to show both the larger impact of the western feminist narratives and ways to reframe them.     

史学与政治——美国“共识”史学初探

史学与政治的关系历来备受关注。但人们往往从史学应不应该为政治服务的角度出发看待它们之间的关系,未免有些简单化。事实上,史学与政治的关系涉及了史学理论的诸多问题。本文围绕“共识”史学探讨史学与政治之间的关系,实际上是探讨史学理论中有关主观性的问题。笔者认为,历史学家的研究活动预设了政治前提,其研究的对象也是在政治环境中产生的。因此,史学与政治之间有一种天然的联系。对此,我们应该有一种自觉的认识,才会有利于我们的历史研究。     

Linkage Politics: the Role of the European Community in Greek Politics in 1973

Abstract

The convulsions which began to shake the Greek military regime with the first student protests at the end of 1972 and which reached their climax in 1973 with the uprising at the Polytechnic in November, have been exhaustively analysed and discussed. However, they have always been viewed either through the prism of internal political developments or in the light of events in Cyprus. The international context remains largely unexplored.     

Society and Politics in the Early Niebuhr

Abstract

This address was delivered at the inaugural meeting of the Reinhold Niebuhr Society. The theological and ethical contributions of the early Niebuhr from his book, Moral Man and Immoral Society, are summarized and then contrasted with adjustments that Niebuhr would make in his thinking in light of the rise of National Socialism and the events of World War II. Then the author turns to contemporary times, reading Niebuhr as a guide to the present situation's moral complexities.