中国历史地貌学开创者张修桂先生学术贡献述评

张修桂先生是中国历史地貌学的开创者和中国历史自然地理学的奠基人之一。他以现代地貌学理论为指导,综合利用多源数据,辅以实地考察,深入解读有关环境变迁的历史文献,为历史地貌学创建了一套独特的研究方法、研究范式与话语体系。他对长江中下游河床地貌演变的研究,自成一体,兼具中国特色,其成果堪称中国历史地貌学的扛鼎之作。有关海河形成、黄河下游变迁、长江中下游湖泊演变及上海成陆的研究在谭其骧先生的基础上,又提出诸多见解。这些研究贯穿古今,促进并深化了我国历史地貌学的发展,是现代地理学与历史地理学的有机结合的典范,也是历史地理学科经世致用的具体体现。他还参与我国现存最早最精美汉代地图的复原和研究,为古地图的拼复提供了关键论证,确保了对该图最大限度的正确复原。他关于古地图的研究和应用亦为地图内史与外史研究奠定了一定基础。     

The role of museums of contemporary art in the re‐telling of historical accounts in Lithuania and Latvia

Museums of History and Art provide accounts of the past and the transition of nations into their current situation. They follow a certain line of interpretation of past events which reflect the dominant belief system in a nation. These narratives told in this process leave room for interpretation. Which particular string of the available narratives is followed while neglecting the others, and is influenced by the current self‐understanding of a nation and its political considerations. Latvia and Lithuania, two Baltic Nations, were planning to set up museums of contemporary art in 2009 and in 2011, respectively. Due to the financial crisis at this time, however, both projects have been put on hold. Based on interviews with key personnel and experts, the paper shows how the museums in both countries interpret their Soviet past and align it with the new European master narratives.     

3. INDIGENOUS EMPIRES AND NATIVE NATIONS: BEYOND HISTORY AND ETHNOHISTORY IN PEKKA HÄMÄLÄINEN'S THE COMANCHE EMPIRE

How should historians write Native history? To what extent should one privilege Native terms, sources, chronologies, and epistemologies? And to what extent should historians align Native history with concepts developed for other peoples and places? These crucial questions about emic (insider) and etic (outsider) approaches to the past are cast into sharp relief in Pekka Hämäläinen's award‐winning The Comanche Empire. This essay charts the perils and possibilities of each position. It then explores possible ways to move beyond the emic/etic division that has dominated many of the recent debates about Native history through a rereading of an episode in which Comanche history collides with US and Mexican history.     

THE POETICS OF ANCIENT GREEK MEMORY AND THE HISTORICAL IMPERATIVE

This book examines Greek engagements with the past as articulations of memory formulated against the contingency of chance associated with temporality. Based on a phenomenological understanding of temporality, it identifies four memorializing strategies: continuity (tradition), regularity (exemplarity), development, and acceptance of chance. This framework serves in pursuing a twofold aim: to reconstruct the literary field of memory in fifth‐century bce Greece; and to interpret Greek historiography as a memorializing mode. The key contention advanced by this approach is that acts of memory entailed an “idea of history” that was articulated not only in historiography, but also in epinician poetry, elegy, tragedy, and oratory. The book offers a rich account of poetic conventions and contexts through which each of these genres counterbalanced contingency through the use of exemplary and traditional modes of memory. This fine analysis highlights the grip of the present on the past as a significant feature of both historiographical and nonhistoriographical genres. The essay argues that this work fills a disciplinary gap by extending the reflection on memory to a new period, Greek antiquity. The retrospective positioning of this period at the outset of Western historical thought brings Grethlein's investigation to the center of debates about memory, temporality, and the meaning history. In engaging with the book's argument, the essay suggests that historiographical memory emerged in Greece not as a first‐order encounter with time, but as a second‐order encounter with forgetting. This confrontation marked a certain separation of historiography from other memorializing genres. Whereas poetic and rhetorical memories were posited against contingency, historiography sought to retrieve those aspects of the past that may otherwise have been irretrievably lost and forgotten. In doing so, it formulated the historiographical imperative as a negation of forgetting that problematized the truth‐value of memory and the very act of remembering the past.     

HISTORY AND THE MANIFEST IMAGE: HAYDEN WHITE AS A PHILOSOPHER OF HISTORY1

To claim that Hayden White has yet to be read seriously as a philosopher of history might seem false on the face of it. But do tropes and the rest provide any epistemic rationale for differing representations of historical events found in histories? As an explanation of White's influence on philosophy of history, such a proffered emphasis only generates a puzzle with regard to taking White seriously, and not an answer to the question of why his efforts should be worthy of any philosophical attention at all. For what makes his emphasis on narrative structure and its associated tropes of philosophical relevance? What, it may well be asked, did (or could) any theory that draws its categories from a stock provided by literary criticism contribute to explicating problems with regard to the warranting of claims about knowledge, explanation, or causation that represent those concerns that philosophy typically brings to this field? Robert Doran's anthologizing of previously uncollected pieces, ranging as they do over a literal half‐century of White's published work, offers an opportunity to identify explicitly those philosophical themes and arguments that regularly and prominently feature there. Moreover, White's essays in this volume demonstrate a credible knowledge of and interest in mainstream analytic philosophers of his era and also reveal White as deeply influenced by or well acquainted with other important philosophers of history. White thus invites a reading of his work as philosophy, and this volume presents the opportunity for accepting it as such.     

Geographies of steam: mapping the entrepreneurial activities of steam engineers in France during the second half of the eighteenth century

Entrepreneurship played a crucial role in the development and diffusion of steam technology. To account for this, we need to map the entrepreneurial activities that helped spread steam technology across Europe and beyond. Because tracing this history’s contours requires attending to local contexts, strategies and uses along with large-scale trajectories, it makes sense to speak of historical ‘geographies’ rather than of steam technology’s historical ‘geography’. Speaking of geographies in the plural also refers to the recognition that places can simultaneously be located in multiple spatial situations, their geographical identities the product of historical work, negotiation and perspective. To illustrate these points, this essay begins by reflecting on what might be called the ‘spatial turn’ in the history of technology and the role of entrepreneurship in the spread of steam technology in France during the second half of the eighteenth century, which is the historical focus of this essay. It then discusses a small number of representative cases of entrepreneurial engagement with steam technology in France and concludes by considering what this tells us about the relationship between the French state and its regions and the impact of the French Revolution in this geographically complex history.     

The Genesis of Economic Cooperation in the Stories of Joseph: A Constitutional and Institutional Economic Reconstruction

Abstract

The paper analyzes in constitutional and institutional economic terms Joseph’s economic policies, such as changes to property rights arrangements for farming, the introduction of a barter tax on crop production, and the multi-layered bureaucratic hierarchies of Egypt. Utilizing Buchanan’s approach to constitutional economics, I argue that these policies lowered attack/defense costs as they arise, when a group attempts to escape from the natural distribution state (the “war of all”, as Hobbes called it). A key thesis is that this encouraged interacting parties, already on the grounds of selfinterested choice, to engage in societal contracting out of the “war of all,” thereby reaping mutual gains.

Complementary to this strand of analysis, I have drawn on other institutional economic concepts, particularly those that were introduced by Williamson, and by North and Weingast. The paper argues in this respect that Joseph’s policies credibly and more reliably guaranteed property rights, which in turn lowered transaction costs of the interacting parties, i.e. Egypt and Israel. This ultimately yielded mutual gains and high economic performance for the society depicted in Genesis. In this way, cooperation was generated in economic terms.     

Ecological Regression and the Analysis of Voter Behavior

Abstract

The project now underway to produce a new, multi-volume print and online edition of Brian Mitchell's British Historical Statistics is an opportunity to examine the history of the celebrated work. An account of its conception, reception, and evolution provides a window through which to examine a central aspect of economic history's disciplinary history and methodenstreit; certain fundamentals relating to the demand for, and supply of, historical statistics; and to introduce the British Historical Statistics Project, which is now underway but still in its infancy, during which it is closely examining its antecedents in order to learn the correct lessons from that history.     

History and Anthropology: A Dialogue

Abstract

Mainstream geographical information systems techniques and packaged geographical information systems software are often inappropriate in historical contexts because they use geographical coordinates as a framework around which all other information is organized as “attribute data,” whereas in history locations are often the least certain part of our knowledge. A new and general architecture for documenting administrative units and organizing historical statistics is detailed, which prioritizes named entities and explicit semantic relationships such as “IsPartOf,” while holding coordinate data where available. This architecture is easily aligned with the recent development of geo-semantics by information scientists, meeting the formal requirements for a geo-spatial ontology, but was originally developed to enable the systematic computerization of traditional historical reference works, notably Frederick Youngs’ Guide to the Local Administrative Units of England.     

A New Approach to Analyzing Historical Urban Growth of Ottoman Cities: Manisa Case Study

Abstract

The physical growth of cities is usually used to define the main direction of a city's development. This definition is key to understanding the city's current state and to plan for the future. Many urban planners agree that master plans should include historical urban growth and aim to specify the effective factors driving urban growth. However, defining urban boundaries and historical urban areas is a difficult task. The lack of satellite images, air photos, and real maps to use as base maps for historical urban studies is a problem that a researcher may face when determining patterns of urban development or conducting other analyses. In this article, the authors examine historical changes of the urban boundaries of the Ottoman city of Manisa. They analyze the physical growth of this large city by using the historical buildings (mosques, masjids, madrasas, baths, caravansary, and others) as markers.