Search Results

Mexican villagers endured three decades of dispossession during the late nineteenth-century dictatorship of Porfirio Díaz (1876–1880, 1884–1911). The transfer of most lands held by communities known as pueblos led many rural people to join the Mexican revolution of 1910–1917, and it helped to structure the postrevolutionary politics. Using E. P. Thompson's concept of “community,” this article suggests that villagers' sense of solidarity formed by their shared lives within the pueblos, and leavened by collective experiences during the Díaz dictatorship and revolution, helped them to forge a new identity as campesinos with an inherent right to land reform during the postrevolutionary era. A core component of campesino identity was opposition to hacienda owners. This opposition set up a struggle over land during the 1920s and 1930s that led some landowners to “weaponize nature” by destroying natural resources such as forests rather than turning it over to villagers through the land reform.

This article explores the development of Korea's conceptual history from the perspective of sociology of knowledge by focusing on the intellectual environment since the early 1990s, pioneers and areas of conceptual research, the kinds of expectations that Korean scholars have of conceptual research, data archiving and methodology, works and tasks of conceptual history in Korea. The article finds that the conceptual research on Korea's modernization is a good approach to construct a reflexive history beyond the false dichotomy of Western influence and nationalistic response.

People once died of nostalgia. This article traces the remarkable trajectory of “la nostalgie africaine” from its original understanding as a clinical form of homesickness to the wistful, but wholly benign, feeling we are familiar with today. It does so by looking at French attempts at colonizing Algeria in the nineteenth century against the backdrop of changing medico-scientific theories of human acclimatization to warm climates. I argue that the latter provoked a positive reevaluation of homesickness and led to the development of a “nostalgic simulacra”: a replica French environment capable of sustaining the sepia-tainted illusion of an “Algérie française.”

This article is an extension of my book on The Sociology of Elite Distinction. In this work, I sought to offer a discussion on the merits and limits of the major models of interpretation dealing with social distinction when confronted with empirical realities in a large number of environments. Here, I propose some reflections about the way historians have been using these sociological models. Although universalistic propositions were often developed, I argue that most grand theories were typical products of their time and also of the societies respectively taken into consideration. The question therefore arises as to what extent their (retrospective) use by historians seeking a conceptual apparatus is always pertinent. It is concluded that many theoretical models are valuable providing we do not see them as “reading grids” that could be systematically applied but rather as analytical tools which are more or less operational according to the contexts studied.

The argument is that Canadian and American historians need significant knowledge of European or Asian history if they are really to understand their own special subject—for at least three reasons. Without a significantly different subject to serve for comparison and contrast, the understanding of any given subject is impossible. The vast majority of our citizens/residents or their ancestors contributed a great part of their cultural heritage to our society. And 300 to 500 years is too chronologically shallow for anyone to grasp adequately the historical process. To illustrate the usefulness of such collateral knowledge, the experiences of four distinct European regions—the middle Danube, the Netherlands, the British Isles, and the Delian League of Ancient Greece—are briefly traced, with North American "applications" sometimes stated and sometimes left to be discerned. The concluding arguments stress the uniqueness of history in emphasizing TIME (the chronological environment) and the need to think metaphorically for understanding and communicating one's subject (the metaphors come from significantly different historical experiences, as well as from the arts).