TOWARD A MULTIDIRECTIONAL FUTURE OF HISTORIOGRAPHY: GLOBALITY,INTERDISCIPLINARITY, AND POSTHUMANITY

Compared with the survey offered in the New Perspectives on Historical Writing nearly three decades earlier, historical practices around the world today have witnessed a remarkable change on several fronts. First, marked expansions occurred in such fields as gender history, history of memory, history of knowledge, and visual history, resulting in their noticeable transformation (for example, “gender history” to “history of sexuality” and “visual history” to “history of things”). Second, by exploring and presenting the “other(s)” in modern historiography, new areas are opened up in postcolonial history, global history, emotions history, and so on, which have prompted historians to reconceptualize their notions of time and space. Third, menacing global climate change and notable breakthroughs in various areas of modern technology have exerted an unprecedented impact on historical writing, exemplified by the new developments in environmental history, neurohistory, digital history, and animal history. Science and technology help historians to rejuvenate their research methodology and teaching pedagogy, but they have also demanded that historians acquire a better understanding of the interaction and co-evolution of humans and nonhumans in history, or to take the nonanthropocentric and nonanthropomorphic approach. In sum, what lies ahead for historians and history students today is a multidirectional future, which is at once an opportunity and a challenge.     

COVID-19 is expanding global consciousness and the sustainability of travel and tourism

Abstract

The sustainable development model has largely failed to address the social and environmental challenges of the 21^st century. True sustainability will only occur when it is valued as a part of the taken-for-granted daily life of individuals and cultures across the globe. This has not yet happened because humanity has not evolved a global consciousness quickly enough to match the global advances in telecommunications and transportation technologies that have created a socially and economically ever-shrinking planet. Travel and tourism contributes to the expansion of global consciousness, although only in a haphazard and unintentional manner. The COVID-19 pandemic is a result of planetary time-space compression and is forcing an expansion in human consciousness that will make humankind better able to address global problems. There will still be considerable diversity on the planet, as now, but the pandemic will stimulate growing numbers of people, businesses and governments to adopt new ways of thinking, behaving and operating that are more closely aligned with the goals of sustainable development. This could be further enhanced if travel and tourism were to adopt the expansion and awakening of global conscious as a fundamental and transformational value in the products and experiences that it offers.     

“FUTURE PAST”: TIME AND TELEOLOGY IN (ANCIENT) HISTORIOGRAPHY

The historian's account of the past is strongly shaped by the future of the events narrated. The telos, that is, the vantage point from which the past is envisaged, influences the selection of the material as well as its arrangement. Although the telos is past for historians and readers, it is future for historical agents. The term “future past,” coined by Reinhart Koselleck to highlight the fact that the future was seen differently before the Sattelzeit, also lends itself to capturing this asymmetry and elucidating its ramifications for the writing of history. The first part of the essay elaborates on the notion of “future past”: besides considering its significance and pitfalls, I offset it against the perspectivity of historical knowledge and the concept of narrative “closure” (I). Then the works of two ancient historians, Polybius and Sallust, serve as test cases that illustrate the intricacies of “future past.” Neither has received much credit for intellectual sophistication in scholarship, and yet the different narrative strategies Polybius and Sallust deploy reveal profound reflections on the temporal dynamics of writing history (II). Although the issue of “future past” is particularly pertinent to the strongly narrative historiography of antiquity, the controversy about the end of the Roman Republic demonstrates that it also applies to the works of modern historians (III). Finally, I will argue that “future past” alerts us to an aspect of how we relate to the past that is in danger of being obliterated in the current debate on “presence” and history. The past is present in customs, relics, and rituals, but the historiographical construction of the past is predicated on a complex hermeneutical operation that involves the choice of a telos. The concept of “future past” also differs from post‐structuralist theories through its emphasis on time. Retrospect calms the flow of time, but is unable to arrest it fully, as the openness of the past survives in the form of “future past” (IV).     

Eavesdropper on the Past: John W. Burrow (1935–2009), Intellectual History and Its Future

Summary

Focused on the much-debated historiographical and academic status of intellectual history, this article addresses for the first time and in detail the methodological views of the British historian John Wyon Burrow (1935–2009). Making use both of his published works and of unpublished material left to the University of Sussex Library (including lectures, letters, academic projects and biographical sketches), its goal is to provide a thorough account of an original and eclectic intellectual historian and, at the same time, cast new light on the role of the discipline in the scholarly context of the last few decades in Europe and the US. More specifically, the following pages will illustrate Burrow's work and career, with particular attention being paid to his insistence on narrative, imagination, irony and style; present his writings as an original instance of the anti-methodological practice of intellectual history; and study his opinions of what it means to carry out the métier d'historien. Finally, by examining Burrow's idea of the intellectual historian as a creative ‘eavesdropper’ on the ‘conversations of the past’ and as a ‘translator’ of past dialogues, this article will both pose some central questions and advance some proposals concerning the future of intellectual history.     

China's Energy Future: A Framing Comment

A noted Hong Kong-based specialist on China's energy industries presents a comment on three papers comprising a symposium on that country's rapidly expanding oil, natural gas, and nuclear power sectors. He frames his observations around five overarching themes that have shaped China's energy sector development over recent decades and will continue to do so in the future. These include observations to the effect that: (a) China's energy policy seeks broadly similar objectives to those of other countries; (b) the country's energy resource endowment is not particularly rich when viewed in relation to the size of its population; (c) its energy mix continues to be dominated by coal, with important implications for the environment and domestic freight transportation; (d) the country's economy is confronting a pronounced spatial mismatch between the location of energy resources and the markets where they are consumed; and (e) strategies for energy developments in China are closely tied to overriding political and economic concerns at any given point in time.     

Analysis on Future Personalized Education under Background of Big Data Era

In order to provide some thoughts and suggestions for future personalized education, this paper mainly analysis the background, opportunity, development and prospect of future personalized education under the background of big data era.On above foundation, the paper presents that future personalized education based on big data era will be a new tide of education.     

中国农民工问题研究述论

进入21世纪以来,"农民工"问题渐成为学术关注的焦点之一。从现状与对策角度进行的研究较多,从历史角度进行的研究有待加强。目前学界围绕农民工的定义、"农民工"现象的起源、农民工问题的历史发展及其处理对策变迁、解决农民工问题的深层次困难、解决农民工问题的前景与基本思路,展开了有关讨论。由于"农民工"在我国城镇化、工业化与现代化进程中将长期存在,因此,"农民工"问题将持续成为学术关注的热点问题。     

邮轮旅游者未来价值评估与潜类分析模型——以大陆、香港和台湾为例

自20 世纪80 年代以来,现代邮轮旅游作为一种休闲度假方式,已经成为欧美国家中产阶级出游的重要选择之一。深入了解中国邮轮旅游者的特点并进行市场细分,有助于推动中国邮轮旅游市场开发。本研究根据顾客终身价值理论,测算了邮轮旅游者的未来价值,并通过探索性因子分析和验证性因子分析研究了邮轮旅游者的消费偏好,建立了邮轮旅游者未来价值评估模型。基于中国大陆、香港和台湾邮轮旅游者的相关数据,通过AMOS21.0 对邮轮旅游者未来价值模型进行了检验,发现了对邮轮旅游者未来价值有显著影响的因素;通过R13.0 软件进一步对显著影响邮轮旅游者未来价值的因素进行了潜类分析,识别出了未来价值较高的邮轮旅游市场,进而为有效地市场开发提供依据。     

Crafting the future: envisioning space exploration in post-war Britain

Prior to the launch of Sputnik, knowledge about human space travel was widely circulated by spaceflight proponents, scientists and news producers in mainstream culture through print, film and broadcast media and displayed in public sites such as museums and public exhibition spaces. Focusing on the timeframe 1947–1953, this article examines how key members of the British Interplanetary Society used a combination of craft skills, graphical technologies, and communication media to create pictures and models to support rhetorical claims that spaceflight and astronautics are legitimate fields of scientific research and space travel could and should be achieved in the near future. Production and circulation of factual knowledge about space travel was not confined to material and discursive practices in established fields such as astronomy and aeronautical engineering. Actors from other professional, non-professional, and social groups contributed to the realization of future spaceflight as an heterogeneous cultural endeavor or astroculture encompassing an array of technical processes, artifacts, craft skills, and scientific knowledge.     

4. EVENTS GETTING AHEAD OF THEMSELVES: RETHINKING THE TEMPORALITY OF EXPECTATIONS

Whereas most theoretical and historiographical accounts of the event have focused on its present and past dimensions, this article addresses the relatively underexplored phenomenon of the future event. As temporal junctures, events often already elicit effects before they come to pass, and even if they never do. Building on foundational work on the relation between experience and expectation by Hans‐Georg Gadamer and Reinhart Koselleck as well as on current historiographical debates on “past futures,” I develop a threefold typology of the future event, distinguishing between the assumption of the routine event, the expectation of the relative event, and the adumbration of the radical event. Engaging with case studies like the year 2000, the ambivalent character of so‐called media events, and ongoing debates about a possible climate collapse and the COVID‐19 pandemic, I show how reconsidering the complex temporalities of the future event can shed new light on the ways in which past societies made their futures present.