Women Readers as Agents of Social Change among Eastern European Jews in the Late Nineteenth Century

This article draws on autobiographies and memoirs, polemical articles from the contemporary press, and bellestristic literature to illuminate the growth of a female reading public in nineteenth-century Eastern European Jewish society. The exclusion of women from religious study and the emphasis on women’s responsibility for managing family businesses which characterized traditional Jewish culture created conditions that permitted some women to receive a secular education. Reading canonic literature in European languages and non-canonic literature in Yiddish, some women became catalysts of socio-cultural change toward the modernization, Europeanization and secularization of Jewish society.     

(Mal)Development in Central America: Globalization and Social Change

This article develops a globalization framework and a model of transnational processes for analysing social change and development, and then applies the model to Central America. The analysis emphasizes determinacy, in the last instance, of social forces in historic developmental outcomes, and documents how social forces in struggles in an emergent transnational environment have shaped Central America's changing profile within the global economy and society. Revolutionary movements, a new class structure, US geo-political considerations, and the internationalization of East Asian economies, have all contributed to a new model of development; from the 1960s into the 1990s the national model of development is being replaced by a transnational model. Maquiladora garment production, tourism, non-traditional agricultural exports, and remittances from emigrant workers are coming to eclipse traditional agro-exports as the most dynamic economic sectors linking the region to globalized circuits of production and distribution. The article also examines Central American migration to the US and gender dimensions of the new transnational model of development.     

The Americans With Disabilities Act as Engine of Social Change: Models of Disability and the Potential of a Civil Rights Approach

The Americans With Disabilities Act, based on the civil rights/minority group and independent living models of disability, may enhance access to health care, personal assistance, employment, the electoral process, and smoke-free environments for people with disabilities. However, this essential law cannot resolve these key issues. Supplemental theoretical and policy approaches will be necessary to promote fundamental change.     

日俄入侵对东北招民垦荒的影响(1860～1911)

随着自19世纪50年代以来沙俄的移民和侵略,清政府逐步解除了东北地区的封禁政策,开始招民垦荒,以图巩固边防.中日甲午战争后,日本也把侵略的触角伸向这一地区.尤其是在日俄战争结束后,沙俄和日本分别将“北满”、“南满”划为各自的势力范围,以铁路为依托,逐步实行殖民统治.沙俄和日本的入侵使得清政府感到自己在东北的统治受到严重的威胁,为维持在东北的统治,进一步把东北的荒地全体开放.总体来看,这一时期清政府在东北地区招民垦荒政策的实施与日俄长期争夺东北是密不可分的.     

Marriage and the family in a Maltese parish: St. Mary's (Qrendi) in the eighteenth century

This article addresses the Maltese traditional family, taking St. Mary's (Qrendi) as a test case. It results that couples married in their early twenties, while a high proportion of men and women never married at all. Marriage was not popular so that one-fifth of all marriages were remarriages. Very few widows remarried and it was only for some economic reason that they sought another man. There is no evidence though that a high rate of celibacy resulted in flagrant promiscuity even if there is evidence that the Qrendin were not so particular about their sex life. No birth control was practiced within marriage and children followed one another regularly. This brings into relief the parents' unconcern for their offspring's future as well as the inferior status of women because husbands made their wives several offspring. Relations between the spouses were poor so that dissatisfied couples went their own ways.     

Intellectuals,Economic Reform and Social Change: Constraints and Opportunities in the Formation of a Nigerian Technocracy

Crisis and economic reforms have changed the status of intellectuals and their relations with dominant élites and policy makers. Because of the technical and ideological nature of these reforms, policy makers have tended to rely on intellectuals as opposed to bureaucrats to shape the agenda of change. This has converted a large number of intellectuals into technocrats and undermined the fabric of academic life in universities. Nowhere is this more pronounced than in developing countries with a large middle class and an economic or financial base that ensures some degree of independence from the multilateral financial institutions. Understanding the success or failure of economic reforms in developing countries requires some analysis of the complex relations between technocrats and political leaders and the societal constraints both sets of actors face. This article explores these issues in the context of Nigeria, whose academic community, bureaucrats and professionals grew in leaps and bounds in the 1970s, following an oil-induced boom. The crisis of the 1980s led to attempts at economic reform and a highly programmed strategy of political change in which academics played a leading role. The article examines the effectiveness of intellectuals in government, and compares the Nigeria case with technocratic experiments in Ghana, Botswana and Côte d?Ivoire.     

Viewpoint: Visibilising Care in the Academy: (Re)Performing Academic Mothering in the Transformative Moment of COVID-19

The effects of COVID-19 have been profoundly felt across higher education as across broader society. In particular, the pandemic has revealed that many of our most stubbornly entrenched inequalities do not simply follow gendered fault lines, but rather care fault lines. In this article, we adopt a maternal epistemology and collaborative witnessing to outline the disruption that academic mothers have experienced during the pandemic. However, we argue that this disruption is not simply obstructive to academic mothers and other caregivers. Rather, COVID-19 has provided a potentially transformative moment for the visibility and normalisation of care in the academy. It has forced the complex negotiation of paid work and care work that academic mothers must constantly manage into the spotlight. The pandemic has provoked an opportunity for a different performance of mothering in the academy; one that does not require us to invisibilise our care to be valued. This (re)performance and revaluation has the potential to reform the cultural landscapes of the academy, towards spaces in which care is reimagined as not simply an encumberment but also an enrichment.     

Romans and Reducing Recidivism: Archaeology,Social Benefit,and Working with Offenders in Wales (Part 1)

Claims that public and community archaeology can help ‘change lives’ have recently come under criticism. Challenging these critiques, this article explores how archaeology can be socially beneficial in the rehabilitation of offenders. Using a case study from South Wales, this article demonstrates how a prison-based outreach project can offer an innovative trajectory for public archaeology, highlighting the links between archaeology and political agendas. The article challenges the concept of ‘archaeologist-as-social-worker’ and considers the successes and limitations of such an approach, including the challenges of measuring impact. Ultimately, it demonstrates that archaeology-based activities can provide positive life experiences for offenders, but only through a successful partnership between heritage and offender management specialists, as part of a wider programme of support and intervention.     

The Politics of Memory: History,Biography, and the (Re)-Emergence of Generational Literature in Germany

The existentialist philosopher Karl Jaspers is the father of a discourse on the spiritual consequences of the Holocaust. First addressed as the Schuldfrage (the question of guilt) by Jaspers immediately after the Second World War in his famous Heidelberg lecture, it has reappeared in various forms in German life and letters. Post-unification Germany has witnessed the valorization of the German experience of the Second World War. This ongoing re-evaluation has its antecedents in the generational literature of the 1970s and 1980s. Whereas the Vaterliteratur of the 1970s (by authors such as Christoph Meckel, Uwe Timm, and Peter Henisch) was often embedded in a left-wing critique of the establishment, recent contributions to this growing genre (by Marcel Beyer, Stephan Wackwitz, Wibke Bruhns, and Ulla Hahn among others) speak to the issue of collective identity and transgenerational family trauma outside distinct left- and right-wing interpretations of National Socialism. The current writings on the life during the Third Reich (filtered through the experiences of discrete generations) are a confluence of historical writing, memorial literature, biography, and fiction. They are closely related to the discussions that W. G. Sebald initiated in his 1997 lecture series on the silence of German postwar literature with respect to German suffering. The subsequent debate on how to bring closure to this “German suffering” was intensified by Günter Grass's widening of the concept of German victimization beyond the air war controversy in his book Crabwalk (2002). As Grass distinguishes clearly between the various post-World War II generations (and their different perspectives on historical events), the question becomes whether these recent writings will bring about a final so-called “zero hour” in German postwar history.     

社交媒体时代的博物馆信息传播——以徐州博物馆为例

社交媒体时代下互联网与手机应用等新媒体技术的兴起,构建出覆盖全球的信息网络,以博物馆为锚点的连接,辐射向更广阔的文化景观与观众群体。社交媒体为一些鲜少涉足博物馆的潜在观众群提供了多种渠道互动沟通的可能。从社交媒体与受众群体的内容和特点入手,可将博物馆社交媒体的运营模式分为平台型、社群型和泛在型三类。从徐州博物馆与国内外博物馆在这一领域的实践探索来看,社交媒体在博物馆信息传播中已有一定的创新应用,收到较好效果,但也面临新的挑战。     

The Festival of St John: Norm and Change in Civitella Roveto in Abruzzo (Italy)

This essay describes the festival of Saint John (24 June) at Civitella Roveto in the province of Aquila, Italy. The ritual is analysed as it was at the beginning of the twentieth century and in its contemporary form, in order to reconstruct the norm of the festival and thereby to show the main transformations of the event, and its shifting social context. In addition, the research highlights the connection between the festival and the ritual cycle, investigated in terms of its interaction with the productive cycle of the community and with the cosmic cycle. Finally, the new social and symbolic meanings assumed by the figure of St John and his festival are brought to light.     

The strange case of ‘John Black’ and ‘Mr Hyde’: constructing migrating Jamaicans as (un)worthy nationals

This paper examines how migrating Jamaicans were constructed as ‘worthy’ or ‘unworthy’ of Jamaican diasporic membership in the early years of statehood, to demonstrate the role of nationalist cultural repertoires in constructing particular diasporic imaginaries. I conduct a discourse analysis of Jamaica's national newspaper, The Daily Gleaner, between 1962 and 1966, a period encompassing crucial transitions in Jamaican migration movements and from colony to statehood. I argue that tropes of respectability present in Afro‐creole nationalist ideology form the cultural repertoires used to distinguish migrants' actions as worthy or unworthy of national membership. These distinctions specify who ‘counts’ as part of the diaspora and how migrants of different social positions may claim and articulate their membership.     

从妄人到名贤:墓志与传世文献所见周子谅形象书写

周子谅受张九龄举荐任监察御史,在张九龄与李林甫的政争中为支持前者而弹劾牛仙客身死。此弹劾事件导致张九龄完全退出权力中心,被视为唐玄宗政治由明转昏的分界点。周子谅生平事迹散见于《周子谅墓志》、正史及唐宋人文集的相关记载,这些文献的写作年代跨度由开元而及于两宋。其中《周子谅墓志》揭示出周子谅作为一个普通官员的生命历程,最为接近其本来面目,却由于墓志本身的私密性而一直湮没无闻。而传世文献则具有公开性和较强的传播力,在这些文献中周子谅的形象相应地呈现为妄人、谏臣、名贤的演变序列,这种演变实质上反映了处于不同社会情境下的文本书写者对于弹劾事件认知的变迁,也可视作理解唐宋之际社会变迁的一条具体线索。     

Rome without Romanization: Cultural Change in the Pre-Desert of Tripolitania (First–Third Centuries AD)

The pre-desert of Roman Tripolitania was one of the most remarkable regions of the empire. From the first to the sixth centuries AD it supported a thriving agricultural community, despite the marginality of the environment. The initial transformation took place at a time when Rome was actively campaigning against the tribes of the true desert. That the settlement of the pre-desert had something to do with Roman action seems obvious enough, but paradoxically the material culture of the pre-desert shows little direct Roman influence. This paper resolves this dilemma by arguing that settlement of the pre-desert came about largely because of the social dynamics of its indigenous nomadic inhabitants. It is argued that Roman military success brought political stability to the pre-desert and that this inadvertently created the conditions that enabled certain sections of pre-desert society to abandon a nomadic existence in favour of a more sedentary one, based on agriculture. This paper explores the reasons why this took place and discusses cultural change in the Tripolitanian pre-desert in light of these conclusions.     

Ancient standards of volume: negevite Iron Age pottery (Israel) as a case study in 3D modeling

Hand-made cylindrical vessels unearthed in excavations of Iron Age IIA sites in the Negev Highlands constitute the largest and most dominant ceramic assemblage of simple-shaped vessels found in Israel. The volumes and linear dimensions of these vessels were analyzed based on computer 3D models reconstructed according to their drawn profiles. This analysis revealed the rules that could have been employed by the ancient potters in order to produce vessels of given volumes. These rules demonstrate the human ability to reveal approximate (but inherent) geometric relationships between form and volume and deploy them in everyday life.