Museum Volunteering: Heritage as ‘Serious Leisure’

The growing number of volunteers in the heritage sector indicates a desire for a leisure experience by pursuing a subject interest with like‐minded people. Millar and others have suggested that volunteers are the ‘ultimate frequent visitors’, and as the day visitor market for museums and heritage attractions declines, this paper offers the repositioning of ‘heritage visiting’ from day visits to longer term connections with particular heritage attractions via volunteering. It draws on Stebbins’s concept of serious leisure as a way of reading museum volunteering as a leisure practice and argues that museum volunteering is a way of practising heritage as leisure that is ‘self‐generated’, with museum volunteers active in constructing their own identities. According to the concept of ‘serious leisure’, museum volunteers become part of a social world inhabited by those knowledgeable about heritage and history. The paper concludes by examining the adequacy of Stebbins’s P‐A‐P system for analysing the power relations between museum professionals and volunteers in the museum social world.     

冷战期间美国文化外交的演变

冷战开始后随着美苏两大阵营的对峙加剧,美国政府通过采取创建新闻署、组建和平队、成立国际交流署等手段,逐步将文化外交融入对外宣传范畴,演变为一种冷战工具,其间政治文化和领袖的国家使命感起到关键作用。这种文化外交在为美国赢得冷战的胜利发挥重要作用的同时,也使其国际信任度和软权力下降。     

试论在美国的中国公民权益受侵犯及其保护

针对目前在美国的中国公民权益受侵犯案件时常发生的现状,结合对从美国回来的华侨进行的社会调查,从国际法的视角,分析了在美国的中国公民权益受侵犯的主要现象和原因;指出了侵犯在当地的中国公民权益,是对国际法上关于国际人权保护和反种族歧视原则的践踏;并就如何保护在美国的中国公民权益问题提出了自己的看法。     

Financialisation as Monopoly Profit: The Case of US Banking

Different economic measures afford different ways of seeing processes of financialisation. In the prototypical case of the US economy, the most compelling evidence of post‐1970s financialisation is found in corporate profits measures. This much has been clear for at least a decade. What remains much less clear, however, is the explanation for the long‐term maintenance and amplification of extreme financial‐sector profitability that financialisation in the United States has and continues to entail. With a specific focus on banking, this article turns to post‐Marxian scholarship on profit rate trends to explain this phenomenon. It argues that limited and declining levels of competition within the US banking sector during recent decades—rooted in high levels of industry concentration, collusive behaviour, and substantial entry barriers—have contributed to sustaining and boosting abnormal sectoral profitability. In doing so, the article theorises financialisation in the United States explicitly in terms of monopoly profit.     

‘Drawing the line’ in El Salvador: Washington confronts insurgency in El Salvador, 1979–92

The United States’ intervention in the Salvadoran Civil War, 1979–92, represented the largest nation-building effort launched by Washington between the end of Vietnam and the second war with Iraq. Washington deployed US Special Forces advisers to El Salvador to prevent further human rights abuses, emphasise the importance of winning the affection of civilians, and professionalise and reform the Salvadoran military. Overall, the intervention produced mixed results, including a negotiated settlement. Despite reservations about the efficacy of US policy, lessons from El Salvador have been reapplied elsewhere, including most recently in Iraq.     

Geophysical investigations of WWII air-raid shelters in the UK

Just before WWII, the British government prepared for an aerial onslaught that was predicted to raze cities and cause mass casualties. By 1938, the Air Raid Precautions Act officially stated that population protection would be through dispersal, meaning evacuation and small-scale protection, local authority responsibility often devolving to householders. Archaeological records of remaining air-raid shelters are relatively rare and under threat. This paper reports on geophysical surveys on three sites in Stoke-on-Trent and London. Results found three intact Stanton shelters in Stoke-on-Trent, located by GPR, electrical resistivity, magnetometry, gravity and electromagnetic methods. In London, partially demolished shelters and an intact, mass public shelter were both detected by EM and GPR methods, with subsequent intrusive investigations confirming results. Study outcomes show hitherto-neglected wartime shelters are in varied condition, with geophysical surveys able to detect, characterise and assess them, helping bring WWII British history into the wider scientific community and public domain.     

Chinese Refugee Children and Empires: The Politics of International Adoptions in Cold War Hong Kong

With the support of new sources from British and Hong Kong archives, this study casts new light on the post-war international adoptions of Chinese refugee children in the British colony of Hong Kong. It argues that while children were ‘saved’ and found families overseas, they were also used as pawns in a bigger political game. A way to delegate welfare for the Hong Kong government, a symbolic humanitarian concession vis-à-vis a strict anti-immigration policy for Britain, and an anti-communist propaganda tool for the United States, these adoptions also convey the competing power and population politics played over subject children by two multiracial empires: one in decline (the rapidly decolonising Britain), the other on the rise (the new cold war superpower).     

Remembrance Diplomacy by the Mayors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in the UN, 1976–2015

This article investigates how the successive mayors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki have worked to institutionalize their collective memory of the nuclear bombings in the United Nations since 1976. Increased institutionalization of the memory in the UN can serve to influence the value system shared by diplomats engaged with nuclear disarmament by making remembrance activities surrounding that memory obligatory. With their moving testimonies, the mayors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki have primarily promoted Hiroshima and Nagasaki remembrance in the UN by tapping into the moral authority traditionally credited to survivors or witnesses of atrocity. They have been largely successful in achieving institutionalization; however, UN institutionalization of Hiroshima and Nagasaki remembrance does not automatically transform into a global collective memory without also being accepted at the national level.     

War Time Hysteria, 1917: Senator Miles Poindexter, ‘American-ness’ and the Strange Case of Colonel Carl Reichmann*

When, on 6 April 1917, the United States entered into the First World War, a wave of anti-German sentiment captured the nation. The Army was not immune from accusations of subversion. In 1917 Senator Miles Poindexter accused a high ranking officer named Carl Reichmann of being in league with Germany. Despite the support from officers such as Hugh Lennox Scott and John J. Pershing, Reichmann was not permitted a promotion to general or service in France. Although most senators supported the promotion, Poindexter was able to prevent a vote on the subject using internal Senate rules. The resulting notoriety Poindexter gained made him a viable Republican candidate in the 1920 election. Although the military did not prevail over Poindexter — thereby continuing the constitutional expectation of military subservience to the civil government — the forces sent to France were without a commander who had gained a scholarly understanding of modern warfare well before the actual conflict.     

Trafficking in US Agriculture

Based on a qualitative methodology that includes in‐depth interviews with 90 Mexican migrant smugglers and 45 Central American farmworkers, this article analyzes the three separate elements of trafficking in US agriculture, namely acts, means, and purposes. We conclude that some US employers participate in human trafficking by financing or helping to recruit and transport Mexican and Central American migrants to the US by means of “abuse of a position of vulnerability” for the purposes of involuntary servitude, debt bondage, and sex exploitation.