甲午战争前后东亚海权与海防的较量及其影响

一场甲午战争,使东亚海权格局剧变,由此构成中日两国命运变化的历史拐点。战前,中日两国面对西方殖民扩张的相同遭遇,展开了近30年的海军现代化建设,并在互为敌手的竞争中日益凸显于以英国为主导的东亚海权格局之中。然而,不同的战略选择决定了不同的命运,甲午战争用血与火诠释了海权与海防的本质区别及其决定性影响。正因为战败后的中国已完全置身于东亚海权格局之外,再次陷入有海无防的境地,导致海权得以坐大的日本推行"大陆政策"更加有恃无恐,在列强瓜分中国的狂潮中走上独霸东亚之路。     

1900年上海及江南的恐慌--兼论“东南互保”的社会氛围

义和团运动时期的北方战事,给包括租界在内的上海及江南民众日常经济生活带来巨大恐慌。身处纷乱的惊惧不安和经济萧条的切实威胁,社会各界普遍企望北方战事早日平息,不致蔓延到南方,这种社会心理氛围,是"东南互保"得以产生和推行的重要原因。     

明初大运河南旺分水枢纽水工技术考

明朝初年,国脉皆仰东南,为解决南方粮财物的北运问题,宋礼和白英受命组织修建了大运河山东段南旺分水枢纽。该枢纽主要包括引汶济运、导泉补源、设立水柜和置闸节流四个组成部分。其中,引汶济运是工程之重点,包括戴村坝、小汶河、南旺分水以及配套工程等四个子系统。这些水利设施组成一个和谐的系统工程,保证了该段运河的水量稳定充足,从而实现了大运河500余年的正常通行。南旺分水枢纽代表了我国古代运河水工的最高科学技术成就,堪称世界水利史上的一大经典范例。     

不伦之伦:越继与降继——从族谱资料看明清徽州宗族承继的变体

宗祧承继是宗族研究的一个重要内容,学界对明清宗族继承问题研究已久,也取得了丰硕的成果,对于越继和降继,则甚少涉及。先贤们对徽州宗族社会有诸多理想性的描述,然而这些描述在很大程度上只是一种表象,现实的徽州社会要复杂得多,越继和降继就是其表现之一。探讨这两种承继方式,对于更好地解读宗祧承继和剖析明清时期徽州宗族社会的发展脉络,都有一定的积极意义。     

Heritage transactions at the Festival of Pacific Arts

The Festival of Pacific Arts, hosted by a different Pacific Island state once every four years, is a prime site for the reproduction of the global discourse on heritage. Drawing on ethnographic research conducted at the festival, this paper focuses on how the concept of heritage is employed at the festival as both an instrument of statecraft and a tool for the assertion of grass-roots political and economic agency. We conclude that heritage in the context of the festival is a form of cultural practice involving relationships of power and inequality, expressed in transactions of ownership and value transformations that have become over determined by economic logic and the concept of property.     

History manifested: making sense of unprecedented change

An essential element usually passes unnoticed in recent discussion about how history as an academic discipline is supposed to be relevant for the shaping of our public life. It is the concept of history itself (history as both the course of events and historical writing) that underlies the whole discussion, which also configures the two currently most influential and fashionable efforts to reinstate the public relevance of history: The History Manifesto, co-authored by Jo Guldi and David Armitage, and Hayden White's The Practical Past. In advising to turn to the past in order to shape the present and the future, both books rely on the familiar developmental view that characterised nineteenth-century thinking in general, and on which the discipline of history became institutionalised in particular. The author's main contention in this essay is that turning to this notion of history is not the solution for the problem of the supposed public irrelevance of professional historical studies, but the problem itself. The developmental view, based on a presumption of a deeper continuity provided by the subject of the historical process that retains its self-identity amid all changes, certainly suited the discipline of history when it was engaged in the project of nation-building. However, it hardly fits our present concerns. These concerns, like the Anthropocene, take the shape of unprecedented change, and what they challenge is precisely the deeper continuity of the developmental view. The discipline of history can regain public relevance only insofar as it proves to be able to exhibit a thinking of its own specificity which can nevertheless explain such unprecedented changes. What such historical thinking could provide is what the developmental view can no longer: the possibility to act upon a story that we can believe.     

Contesting the Divided City: Arts of Resistance in Skopje

This paper examines issues of power and resistance in “divided cities”. Basing my analysis on fieldwork I carried out in Skopje, Macedonia, I look at how urban space may be constructed and used by hegemonic groups as a means of asserting their power and how, in turn, the city may be a place of resistance where power is contested and public space reappropriated. Drawing on Lefebvre's perspective on the production of space, I compare the conceived city to the lived city and examine how urban inhabitants may resist the division of the city and challenge hegemonic representations. I also draw on Debord's psychogeography to define an artistic, active and participatory approach to urban space through which the inhabitants may re‐conquer their right to the œuvre and to the city. I argue that the city as a lived environment may offer narratives other than division and that there are alternatives to the divided city.     

“Ceci n’est pas un fragment”: Identity,Intertextuality and Fictionality in Sappho’s “Brothers Poem”

In this article, Sappho’s Brothers Poem is re-evaluated and analysed from various perspectives that have not been addressed sufficiently in scholarship so far. First, some questions of principle regarding the role of the brothers and the Sapphic speaker are discussed. Secondly, the poem’s communicative situation is examined, and different options for the identification of the person addressed as “you” are considered. Thirdly, it is demonstrated how the poem establishes an intertextual dialogue with the Homeric Odyssey on various levels, and how this dialogue affects the general understanding of the poem. Finally, the commonly held view that the five transmitted stanzas do not represent the entire poem is challenged. The article concludes with some wider considerations about some of the most common assumptions regarding the nature and the fragmentary state of the Brothers Poem.     

What Remains: Repatriating and Entombing a Canadian Unknown Soldier of the Great War in the Nation’s Capital

This article chronicles and contextualizes the creation of a Tomb of the Unknown Soldier in Canada’s capital. In so doing, it traces the myriad considerations, as well as complexities — political, procedural, and practical — that abounded in bringing this major memorial installation into being, namely the repatriation, from a Commonwealth War Graves Commission cemetery in France, of a Canadian unknown soldier of the Great War and his ceremonial reburial in Ottawa. Moreover, it argues that the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, situated within an existing monumental space, functions, in the coinage of geographer Owen Dwyer, as an allied symbolic accretion to the National War Memorial.