对新世纪职工素质教育的现实思考

新世纪职工素质教育的目标应确定为 :以提高职工的思想道德素质、科学文化素质、职业技能水平、创新创效能力和市场竞争能力为重点 ,不断提升职工新技能、新职业开发水平 ,帮助职工确立终身学习观念 ,使职工队伍的整体素质和综合竞争水平有明显提高。     

新世纪第二个十年的热期望与冷思考

本世纪头二十年全面建设惠及十几亿人口更高水平的小康社会时间已经过半,成就喜人,问题也多多,这个重大的系统工程,需要在实践中不断探索前进。坚持马克思主义唯物史观,沿着中国特色社会主义道路,调动一切积极因素,不懈怠,不毛躁,才能稳步地达到既定目标。     

Orphans,apprenticeships, and the world of work

This article explores a frequent and important practice in the ancien Régime society, namely, apprenticeship. The apprenticeship contracts of legitimate orphans (boys and girls) who were received in institutions that specialized in caring for them — such as the Trinité or the Saint-Esprit — provide the data for this study. By focusing on these two, it is possible to compare two groups of orphans, as well as differences in the intentions and accomplishments of the institutions in terms of offering instruction and preparation for the working world. This examination focuses on the transition from the institution to society. How did the orphans interpret this transition? And how did administrators perceive their roles? The example of the Trinité and the Saint-Esprit serves to rectify the common image of the hospitals as poor and highly imperfect in terms of education and apprenticeship. It shows that these were genuine training institutions for older children.     

Meiji Japan's China solution to Tokugawa Japan's China problem

The underlying concern of this article is with the function and purpose of the normative imaginary of ‘China’, Chūgoku (Zhongguo) or Chūka (Zhonghua) in the Japanese discourse up to and around the mid-nineteenth century; namely, how it was deployed to make sense of the historical situation facing the contemporaries amid the combined internal and external crises and how it structured the range of options available to them. To exemplify this, we first turn to the debate of the shape of the polity that straddled the critical decades of 1850s–1860s. The self-conscious restoration of a past political ideal was the ostensible justification of the revolutionary overhaul, but in terms of the models of polity, there existed very different versions and understandings of what past could or should be restored. In the classical conceptual language of politics, the choice was between the hōken and gunken model. While the year 1871 saw a closure that cast Meiji as a gunken revolution, the debate continued beyond and the shift of preferences from hōken to gunken needs to be explained. In arguing for Meiji as a ‘Chinese revolution’, we can further point to the surprising degree of overlap between the concerns of earlier Edo-period commentators and the actual factors of the revolution when it finally arrived. Lastly, the normative imaginary of China is shown to have served as the key mediating filter for processing and appropriating the West both before and after the Meiji revolution.     

Farm transmission and the commercialization of agriculture in northern Maine in the second half of the 19th century

The transition to capitalism has been one of the most discussed issues in the historiography of the rural United States in the 18th and 19th centuries, but the typology, and the “market revolution” construed upon it, are problematic. The article explores some of these problems by examining the commercialization of eastern Canadian agriculture, which was a prolonged process starting in the beginning of the 19th century in the St. Lawrence–Great Lakes axis and ending during the 1960s in the outlying parts of Quebec, Ontario, and the Maritime Provinces. It is difficult to identify clear trends in the numbers yielded by evidence from this region for the time period in question. Highly commercial farms were more likely than the others to transfer all their property to their children. Deficit farmers were much more likely than the others to transfer all their property to outsiders. But the data do not support the view that farmers who were keen on turning their farms into moneymaking businesses adopted property transmission practices that were markedly different from the others. And before the 1830s, there was really no need to have strategies in place because land was plentiful.     

Gender aspects of inheritance strategies and land transmission in rural Scania,Sweden, 1720–1840

This study deals with gender aspects of land transmissions in pre-industrial Sweden. Although not supported by law, a clear mentality of male primogeniture among peasants existed in the Swedish countryside in the 18th century. In many cases, however, this ideal could never be realized, making the idea of the “family farm,” handed down from father to son for generations, more of a myth than a reality. This study uses postmortem inventories linked to tax registers and family reconstitutions for a sample of parishes in southern Sweden to show that various strategies were chosen when transferring the farm after the death of the husband or wife. Although sons were more likely to take over the farms, daughters (or more correctly sons-in-law) also frequently did so, as did, sometimes, more distant kin and non-kin. Moreover, it was not the case, as has sometimes been maintained, that daughters took over the farm only when no able-bodied sons were available. On the contrary, daughters (sons-in-law) quite frequently took over the farm even when sons were present. The decision on land transmission was part of a more general family strategy concerning reproduction (access to marriage and household formation) as well as old-age security.     

Children in the 20th-century family economy: From co-providers to consumers

The position of children in the family economy changed fundamentally from the 19th century onward. In the Netherlands, the first child labor act was introduced in 1874; compulsory schooling was established in 1901. Since then, the economic contribution to the family income by children has gradually disappeared. Until the 1960s, in working-class families, the financial contribution of adolescents to the family income remained of great importance. Young workers gave their whole wage to the family in exchange for housing, food, clothes, and some pocket money. This article describes how the economic role of teenagers has changed since then. Nowadays, children and adolescents do not contribute to the family purse any longer.     

The Antwerp COR*-database: A unique Flemish source for historical-demographic research

This note describes the origin, the history, structure and characteristics of a recently constructed Flemish (the Northern, Dutch-speaking part of Belgium) historical-demographic database. The so-called Antwerp COR*-database offers a unique combination of features: it spans nearly seven decades (1846 to 1920) and consists of information drawn from the population registers and the vital registration records (birth, marriage, and death) of the whole district of Antwerp. Every person whose family name starts with the letter combination COR* is selected in the database. The database covers three linked generations and contains micro-data on the individual level (life courses), intermediary data on family patterns, and macro-data on ecological characteristics.     

Intergenerational mobility in the Ottoman Empire: Observations from eighteenth-century Kastamonu

Based on probate estate inventories from eighteenth-century Kastamonu in north Anatolia, this study examines intergenerational mobility patterns in one Ottoman provincial town. Although the topic is well-studied in many Western contexts, historical and contemporary, we still know little about the ways in which socioeconomic disparities and class identities were transmitted across subsequent generations of parents and children in the Ottoman Empire. In order to explore this issue in a sophisticated fashion, this article introduces quantitative techniques and categories of analysis tailored specifically for Ottoman sources. In addition to other findings, our analysis suggests that Kastamonu in the eighteenth century was vertically and horizontally segmented: Not only were there significant impediments to intergenerational mobility across privileged and underprivileged sectors of the society, such transitions were also infrequent across sub-groups within upper and lower classes. Despite a general lack of intergenerational fluidity at all socioeconomic levels, however, our calculations also reveal that the provincial elite were particularly immobile.     

Ethnic diversity and its spatial change in Latvia, 1897–2011

Utilizing data from five census enumerations of Latvia (including the most recent 2011 census), this study analyzes temporal and spatial trends in ethnic diversity in the country at the national and municipal levels. The measure employed, the ethnic diversity index (EDI), makes possible a more sophisticated interpretation of the dynamics of ethnic diversity than an analysis of the changing percentage shares of Latvia's various ethnic groups over time. At the national level, a trend of declining ethnic diversity prior to Latvia's incorporation into the Soviet Union was followed by a rapid increase during the Soviet period, before the onset of gradually decreasing diversity during the post-Soviet period. These national-level trends obscure a number of trends evident at the municipal level, including salient (depending on the period) ethnic diversity gradients Rīga–Latvia, cities/towns–countryside, and the east–west. Latvia remains one of the most ethnically diverse countries of Europe, and the study outlines some of the implications of the recent stagnation of regional EDIs at rather high levels for the economic and political life of the country.