The Historian and the Church

DEREK BEALES AND GEOFFREY BEST, eds. History, Society and the Churches: Essays in Honour of Owen Chadwick. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1985. Pp. x, 335. $49.50 (US).     

The Oral Historian as Memorist

This paper explores some issues in relation to oral historyand memory that emerge in Alessandro Portelli's The Order HasBeen Carried Out. I examine the contemporary role of the oralhistorian, the relationship between the present and the pastin memory work, and make some comments about how we might articulatethe field of oral history with memory studies more closely forthe enrichment of both.     

The Task of the Historian

Book reviewed in this article:
Gabrielle M. Spiegel, The past as Text: The Theory and Practice of Medieval Historiography     

杰里·H．本特利教授学术报告纪要

2004年10月19日,美国夏威夷大学教授、《世界历史杂志》主编、美国世界史协会会长 杰里·H.本特利(Jerry H.Bentley)在中国社会科学院世界历史研究所作了题为"世界历史 的昨天、今天和明天"的学术报告。本特利教授以宏观的理论视野,勾勒出在漫长的时间跨 度中世界历史研究的发展脉络及其研究范式的转变。 本特利教授认为,世界历史在最早的历史著作中即已出现。在古代世界,西方与东方的 历史学家在立足本民族历史研究的同时,开始将眼光投向更为广阔的外部世界,注重不同民 族与地区之间的联系。中世纪的编年史家则常常以《圣经》中的创世说和不同民族的起源作     

Nietzsche as Deep Historian

The recent biocultural turn in evolutionary and neurological research suggests that prior efforts to combine historical and biological thinking, often dismissed as crude biological determinism, warrant a second look. In this essay, I show how a number of Nietzsche’s main ideas about historiography anticipate these developments. Nietzsche insisted that the study of history could assimilate the natural sciences by overcoming fixed disciplinary assumptions about when history begins, thereby extending the historical timeline deep into our species’ past. He also described the ongoing transformations in human mental structure that have been generated through the complex historical interaction of human biology and culture. Nietzsche viewed this interaction as crucial to understanding historical phenomena such as the power of religious organization and ritual, the emergence of democratic egalitarianism, and the formation of entrenched social hierarchies.     

An Historian in the Amazon

However private they may seem, emotions depend for their meanings on the communities in which they are expressed. But if emotions are shaped by and for their communities, how can we account for emotional change? After briefly surveying how historians have (1) defined the communities in which emotions have been expressed and (2) explained how and why emotions have changed, this article turns to the community of the Waorani of Amazonian Ecuador. It explores whether anthropological explanations of emotional change in that “test case” may help the historian. The answer is not entirely positive. The article concludes with some thoughts about what sorts of collaborations between historians and anthropologists might be more productive for emotions studies.