Brazilian History as Global History

The article discusses the relationship between global history and Brazilian history and suggests an agenda for future research. It argues that global history scholars could profit from Brazil's great scholarly tradition, which conceptualises key topics of global history such as global encounters and cultural identities, power asymmetries and spatial orders. Scholars interested in Brazilian history, on the other hand, will find a set of approaches and questions from a global history perspective helpful for research on central fields of Brazil historiography such as the coffee economy, scientific racism, the Cold War and the Amazon.     

Politicians Using History

The political potency of national history has been understood for generations. Yet there has been an unquestionable surge in history's political influence over the last twenty or thirty years, as the various history wars that have broken out around the world attest. Australia has been no exception: disputes over its national story continue to generate considerable controversy in the media, in politics and in public debate. But how has this politicisation of the past affected Australian political history in the present? This paper examines how history is practised in contemporary Australian politics — and notices an increasingly strategic use of the past by politicians in recent years.     

Business and History

Anglo: Anglo American and the Rise of Modern South Africa by Duncan Innes Raven Press, Johannesburg, 1984. 358 pp. including tables, figures, appendices, bibliography and index. R14,94 paperback.     

"Real Solemn History" and its Discontents: Australian Political History and the Challenge of Social History

The relationship between Australian political and social history has received little historiographical attention. Political history has been lauded or, more often, dismissed as traditional historical practice, while from the 1960s social history took its place as a catch-all phrase for various "new" histories concerned with everyday life. This article examines the place of political and social history in the nascent Australian academic historical profession of the 1950s to the early 1970s, and then explores the impact of the new social history on academic political history. It will suggest that while there was only limited exchange before the late 1980s, in the last twenty years social history has contributed modestly to a reconstituted understanding of political history as part of lived experience.
"[…] I can read poetry and plays, and things of that sort, and do not dislike travels. But history, real solemn history, I cannot be interested in. Can you?"
"Yes, I am fond of history."
"I wish I were too. I read it a little as a duty, but it tells me nothing that does not either vex or weary me. The quarrels of popes and kings, with wars or pestilences, in every page; the men all so good for nothing, and hardly any women at all — it is very tiresome: and yet I often think it odd that it should be so dull, for a great deal of it must be invention […]". ¹     

Feminism and Political History

Political historians traditionally privileged the political activities of men and masculine political institutions. This vision of political history was revised from the early 1970s, first by "women's history" and later due to the influence of the "gender turn". The latter encompassed a recognition that conceptions of masculinity and femininity contribute to the shaping of political power. Both developments challenged but ultimately reinvigorated political history. However, as this article will argue, political history and feminist history remain to an extent quarantined from one another, despite the radical potential for feminist scholarship to change the way politics is conceived.     

试论美国外交史上的对外干预--兼论自由主义意识形态对美国对外干预的影响

本文从政治文化和国家安全两个视角分析了美国对海外干预态度的历史演变。作者认为,在对外干预问题上,美国经历了从19世纪的反对对外干预,20世纪前半期的有限干预到冷战时代全面的经济、政治和军事干预的演变。美国历史上的对外干预既出于权力与利益的需要,又根植于美国独特的以自由为核心的政治文化之中。在后冷战时代,国家安全需要、输出民主的理想和可承受的低代价预期构成当前和今后决定美国对外干预行为的三大要素,拟议中的干预行动越能满足这三大要素,就越可能被付诸实施。     

俄罗斯历史中的东西方之惑

俄罗斯千余年的历史可以概括为三段西学史。而其每次西学都大体经历学习模仿—民族自觉—超越—对立的过程。在这个过程中,俄罗斯的民族自觉意识不断要求历史哲学对俄罗斯与西方历史形成的亲缘关系作出反思,要求在相似之中明确差异,以确立俄罗斯文化的独特性。研究俄罗斯西学的过程,剖析俄罗斯东西方问题的实质,不仅有助于准确地把握俄罗斯历史发展的轨迹,而且有助于对俄罗斯的发展前景作出展望。