From Mission to Maynggu Ganai: The Wellington Valley Convict Station and Mission Site

The Wellington Valley Convict Station and Mission site, now known as Maynggu Ganai Historic Site (meaning “people’s land” in local Wiradjuri language), contains the archaeological remains of the convict agricultural station that was established in 1823. The site, subsequently taken over by the Anglican Church Missionary Society as a mission to the Wiradjuri, operated from 1832 to 1844. Drawing upon archaeological survey, the extraordinary historical archive associated with this site, and an analysis of community consultative research, this article explores the role of this site in colonial cultural exchange, as well as the contemporary cultural meanings of this history and its physical remains for the community today.     

A Unique Project of Mission: Forty Years on,a Personal Memoire

Fifty years ago, Call to the North was conceived against the background of sectarian terrorism. This was a unique occasion when all the traditional Christian churches of the North of England were engaged in unitedly presenting the Christian faith to the general population. The exercise was led by the Anglican Archbishop of York together with the Roman Catholic Archbishop of Liverpool and Dr John Marsh representing the Free Churches.

The objectives of the exercise, the methods employed, the problems encountered and its eventual outcome in 1973 are outlined, together with an account of the Roman Catholic Archbishop’s strategy of seeking Pope Paul VI’s support to help his traditional dioceses come to terms with the new Vatican thinking of Pope John XXIII and Vatican II.

The account concludes with a reflection on the historic outcome of this unique exercise.     

Catalyzing Cultural Heritage Data for Mission Success: Project ORCHID

Cultural resources professionals of the U.S. Air Force partnered with other stakeholders in recent years to ensure U.S. military personnel engaged in contingency actions, disaster response, and other related activities have sufficient visibility of host nation important cultural properties to avoid or minimize harmful effects. Since 2009, Project ORCHID has established a baseline of institutional knowledge, procedures, and planning information to begin to meet this need. This paper summarizes the main components of the project to date.     

Schooling on the Missionary Frontier: The Hohi Mission Station,New Zealand

Schooling was integral to the process of missionization in many of the places where it occurred throughout the world, yet it has scarcely been explored through the archaeological record. Excavations at Hohi, New Zealand, located a school founded by CMS missionaries in 1816, providing a material record that, in conjunction with documentary sources, enables reconstruction of schooling during the earliest stages of cultural engagement in this part of the Pacific. The motivations of both missionaries and indigenous Maori in the establishment and erratic progress of this school are examined, highlighting the role of indigenous agency in the cultural engagements that played out there.     

The Secret Society's Secret: The Invoked Reality of the Tiandihui

This essay examines two sets of reports in the Qing-dynasty Jiaqing and Daoguang periods (respectively 1796-1820 and 1821-45) in order to understand better the perceived reality of the Tiandihui.The first set,found among the papers of Jiangxi governor Xianfu (1809-14),allows a comparison of a criminal gang that invoked the Tiandihui ceremony with one that did not.The second set includes the diary of Taihe county magistrate Xu Dihui (in office from 1824) that recorded various events which came to be reported to the senior officialdom as having been conducted by secret societies.By collating the incidents as reported in the diary and memorials to the emperor,the authors argue that the pressure of the administrative process was responsible for the ultimate acquiescence by the Hunan governor Han Wenqi (in office 1825-29) in the perception of an indisputable connection of the incidents with secret societies.Moreover,both sets of reports show that participants in secret-society ceremonies and officials who suppressed them knexv that the acclaimed networking of the Tiandihui as implied in its folklore was very far from the reality.     

A Letter from David Hooson to a Soviet Journal

David Hooson, now at the University of California, Berkeley, has been, together with Ian M. Matley of Michigan State University, among the principal North American interpreters of Soviet methodological discussions in geography, including the controversy surrounding V. A. Anuchin. The present letter, in which Hooson corrects a quotation cited out of context and an error of translation in a Soviet journal, represents one of the few, modest attempts to achieve a dialogue between Soviet and American geographers.     

戈洛夫金使团来华考论

本文认为嘉庆十年出使中国的戈洛夫金使团,是清代中俄关系史上规模最大的一次外交出使活动.此次出使反映了19世纪初俄国在对华贸易中的新诉求、对两国争议土地划界的态度以及清廷对两国关系的认识等问题.     

From Soviet Modernization to Post–Soviet Transformation: Understanding Marriage and Fertility Dynamics in Uzbekistan

In this article we analyse the dynamics of marriage and childbearing in Uzbekistan through the prism of the recent socioeconomic and political history of that country. After becoming an independent nation in 1991, Uzbekistan abandoned the Soviet modernization project and aspired to set out on a radically different course of economic, social, and political development. We argue, however, that not only independence but also the preceding period of perestroika reforms (1985–91) had a dramatic effect on social conditions and practices and, consequently, the demographic behaviour of the country's population. Using data from the 1996 Uzbekistan Demographic and Health Survey we apply event–history analysis to examine changes in the timing of entry into first marriage, first and second births over four periods: two periods of pre–perestroika socialism, the perestroika years, and the period since independence. We investigate the factors that influenced the timing of these events in each of the four periods among Uzbeks, the country's eponymous and largest ethnic group, and among Uzbekistan's urban population. In general, our results point to a dialectic combination of continuity and change in Uzbekistan's recent demographic trends, which reflect the complex and contradictory nature of broader societal transformations in that and other parts of the former Soviet Union.     

Soviet elites and European integration: from Stalin to Gorbachev

This article argues that, like the liberalising “Great Reforms” of Russia in the mid-19th century, Mikhail Gorbachev's perestroika of the late 20th century was propelled as much by reformist intellectuals' Europe-inspired visions of a more humane society as it was by military-economic crisis. Over the post-Stalin decades, a new policy-academic elite – economists, philosophers, scientists and writers – viewed in the apparent success of East European reforms a model of “socialism with a human face” for their country's eventual reintegration into a “common European home.” Yet their understanding of European integration was too superficial, and their appreciation of communist hard-liners' resistance too belated, to carry their reforms to successful completion. This article also holds that Russian reformers' naiveté was compounded by Western leaders' selfishness and short-sightedness. The latter clung to Cold War beliefs that the Soviet system could not produce a genuine reformist movement. When Gorbachev came to power, his perestroika was considered merely a “ruse,” its ideas of “new thinking” ridiculed, and ultimately only the “shock therapy” of Boris Yeltsin merited significant Western aid despite its broad incompetence and vast corruption. The combined Western-Russian failures in 1990s efforts toward rapid marketisation and integration proved even more damaging than those of the 1980s due to their broad discrediting of Western liberal democracy.