Speaking of Books: The Prime Minister

Peter Hennessy, The Prime Minister: The Office and Its Holders Since 1945 (Allen Lane, 2000), pp. xiv + 686, index.     

19世纪后半期澳洲排华运动与澳大利亚联邦运动

19世纪后半期 ,利益的接近与趋同导致在以英国移民及其后裔为主体的澳大利亚白人之间逐渐形成了愈加明确的民族认同感 ,进而导致澳大利亚民族国家———澳大利亚联邦的建立 ,这一演进过程就是澳大利亚联邦运动。而与此相伴随的澳洲排华运动则加速了澳洲各地白人之间的联系与联合 ,加剧了澳大利亚各殖民地与英国之间的分离并成为联邦运动的一个重要组成部分。     

Editorial: The Sympathetic Agnostic: Britain's Next Prime Minister

Abstract

This essay engages the "politics of vision" as a potential template for choosing future presidents. The rhetoric of "vision" is drawn from theological precepts that are grounded in prophetic and transformational discourses. The current politics of popularity, and the reality show atmosphere that surrounds presidential elections, have not held the nation in good stead. We labor under the myth of our own goodness and believe that it doesn't matter who runs the nation, since the balance of power between the branches of government, and a free activist press will protect us from our own bad choices. Recent history proves that we must pay more attention to the criteria by which individuals are selected, because twenty-first-century high stakes political strategies can neutralize even the best laid plans of the nation's founders. To analyze the criteria for selecting future presidents, I turn to the work of writer/activist James Baldwin, theologian/activist William Stringfellow, and ethicist/politician Barbara Jordan. They conclude that vision does not require a crystal ball, just prophetic discourse and moral responsibility. The next President of the United States should be a spiritually mature truth-teller, whose vision for America is congruent with the hopes and dreams of a weary electorate.     

十六国北朝的史官制度与史学发展

十六国北朝时期史官制度的发展,有力地推动了史学的发展。这同当时的史官制度和史学发展两者之间有着比较有效的互动关系是分不开的。它主要体现在以起居注为主要内容的史料工作的规范化,国史编撰制度的初步确立,以及史官职掌和良史意识的有机结合等方面。     

The unavoidable salience of gender: notes from Australian childcare work

This article explores the gendering of work in Australian childcare settings from a post-gender perspective. Much early childhood research focuses on encouraging men into the field, seeing their presence as beneficial to the perceived worth of childcare work. Such research ignores how women’s gendered experiences, as the overwhelming majority of the workforce, are already shaping the field, creating an image of this work apparently unpalatable to most men. I show how gendered relations have a profound impact, even in mono-gendered spaces like childcare, to the continuing disadvantage of women. Workers caught within binary understandings of gender appear to draw on normative gendered discourses to understand the social and economic positioning of the field, rather than more emancipatory framings. This article argues that perspectives that actively question biomedical understandings of gender can be useful in understanding and challenging the gendering of particular societal spaces, such as childcare services.     

An Approach to the Mapping of Changes in the Settling Process

A variety of mapping techniques are used to establish regional differences in the settling process in Irkutsk Oblast and to measure the process in general terms. The most dynamic area, with urban and rural population growth, is the Middle Angara valley, where industrialization has been combined with the development of rural nonfarm places based on resource development and construction. Both urban and rural decline is typical of old mining districts, such as the coal district of Cheremkhovo and the gold area of Bodaybo. In most of Irkutsk Oblast, urban growth has been associated with rural decline. An important factor in the rural settling process has been a reduction of the number of places and an increase of the mean size of places, with remarkable stability in the 200–300 population class of rural places. Analysis of the settling process yields a map that distinguishes population growth, decline or stability in combination with a predominance of particular population size classes among rural places. A previous paper by the author on the mapping of the settling process appeared in Soviet Geography, December 1969.     

The Australian ballot: Not the secret ballot

Australian historical and political science academic accounts of the ‘secret ballot’ often describe it as being designed in Australia and first applied in Victoria in 1856. Narratives often focus on Chartists and radicals finding fertile ground in the New World for ideas that had met insurmountable resistance in the Mother Country. But this concentration on the ‘British story’ has led to a misconception in this country: that the secret ballot was first tried in Australia. This comes from conflating the ‘Australian ballot’ with the ‘secret ballot’. Voting by ballot, in ‘secret’—that is, not by a show of hands, on the voices or signed voting paper—was in use in America and Europe well before being implemented in Australia. This was the secret ballot many demanded for Australia, but they got something else: the Australian ballot, wholly original, with identifying features—such as the government printed ballot paper—previously unimagined. The Australian ballot was not the world's first secret ballot; it was much more important than that.     

Diplomacy and Loans: the Foreign Office,Economic Reconstruction,and Security in South-Eastern Europe in the 1920s

This article embarks on the discussion of tensions between political and finanical strands of British policy towards two smaller states in South-Eastern Europe – Hungary and Bulgaria – during the first decade after the First World War. The two case studies examine the way in which conflicting agendas of the Foreign Office and the Treasury affected each other in connexion with reconstruction loans given to Hungary and Bulgaria. They touch on that part of foreign policy where both the Foreign Office and the Treasury were concerned, and where economic reconstruction, promoted by the latter, clashed with what were primarily security considerations, pursued by the former. The role of London as a financial centre of the world and the key position of the Bank of England in carrying out collaborative enterprises of great international banks provided the Foreign Office with a valuable lever to bring pressure to bear on the smaller South-Eastern European Countries and force them conform to Whitehall's expectations. However, the opportunities this offered invariably went begging due to the Treasury's unfaltering resolve to proceed with its own schemes and its refusal to cooperate with the Foreign Office and allow it to achieve its political goals.     

Settling the kings' lands: aprisio in Catalonia in perspective

Important aspects of social history can sometimes be lost in legalisms. A long debate, recently continued in EME, has studied the right of aprisio claimed by those who took over wasteland on the frontier of the future Catalonia. This paper argues that previous treatments of the term have conflated many separate factors and misunderstood what aprisio actually was in practice. When studied at ground level it seems that, despite the role given to immigrant settlers by historians, landholders by aprisio need not have been newcomers, but locals using new rules for otherwise normal land clearances.