The Duration of Book Credit in Colonial New England

Account books show that merchants frequently used book credit in exchanges with consumers. The ability of credit to act as a substitute for currency in payments depends on the terms attached to the credit, such as its duration. To investigate duration more systematically, the author employs life table analysis and the singulate mean age at marriage, methods commonly used in demography, to analyze debt records from eighteenth-century Connecticut and Massachusetts. He arrives at expected duration estimates in excess of those in the literature. Given the expected duration, book credit seems to be a good substitute for other forms of payment. If this is so, a major revision of literature on colonial monetary matters may be in order.     

Indo-Hispanic Dynamics: From Contact to Colonial Interaction in the Greater Antilles

Indo-Hispanic interaction is an essential issue in the colonial period in the Caribbean, but its study is currently marginalized as an offshoot of pre-Columbian archaeology. This state of affairs denies the indigenous contribution to the past and present ethnocultural composition of the region and privileges a colonial approach in scholarship. This paper reviews important aspects of the history of archaeological research on contact and colonial interaction in the Greater Antilles and its theoretical underpinnings. It also presents two recent archaeological case studies that show different facets of the interaction processes using new methodological approaches: El Cabo, Dominican Republic, with evidence of early contact, and El Chorro de Maíta, Cuba, a context of interethnic interaction under colonial conditions.     

墨西哥革命:从官方史学到修正派史学

墨西哥革命史学思潮的发展趋势与革命后墨西哥经济、政治、思想和学术潮流的变化密不可分。革命期间到20世纪30年代,各革命派系皆站在自身的立场上评价墨西哥革命;30年代后,为了促进国家的统一,在墨西哥政府和执政党的直接倡导和参与下,创立了墨西哥革命的官方史学;四五十年代后,特别是1968年特拉特洛尔科事件后,随着墨西哥经济增长和政治稳定奇迹的终结,以及国内历史学科的发展和国际学术交流的影响,产生了修正派史学。然而,80年代以后,修正派史学在某些方面也受到一定的质疑。