Ren Rong： Dedicated to Cultural Dialogues between East and West

Over the past decade, Ren Rong has dedicated himself to cultural dialogues between China and West and gradually developed his own artistic stvle and built his own image and svmbol system.In the context of globalization of contemporary art, Ren Rong, as an international artist with the background of Chinese culture, is gaining growing recognition worldwide.[第一段]     

Cultural engagement across the life course: Examining age–period–cohort effects

Longitudinal studies of cultural engagement are uncommon. This paper explores whether there are stable latent clusters of cultural engagement over time and whether age–period–cohort (APC) effects explain within-person changes between these clusters across the life course. Using data from the British Household Panel Survey (N?=?25,149), I conduct longitudinal latent class analysis to uncover the latent patterns of cultural consumption across nine activities: cinema, watching live sport, attending the theatre, eating at a restaurant, doing DIY, attending an evening class, meeting with local groups, volunteering, and going to a club/pub. Then, I explore whether APC effects are observable in the data using scatterplot smoothing, lowess regression. Six latent clusters are consistently observed in each wave: None, DIY, Restaurant/Pub, Cinema/Theatre, Volunteer, and All (almost all activities). A large number of respondents have highly stable patterns of cultural engagement but there is also a substantial degree of variation. Transitions between latent clusters over time occur between those that are compositionally similar (in terms of activities). These changes in patterns of cultural engagement are partially explained by age effects, such as time constraints and health. Additionally, there is some evidence of cohort effects among the youngest cohorts moving into the “All” latent cluster, the cluster with the most cultural breadth.     

Royal Grief in England, 1485–1640

This essay explores recorded responses to bereavements within the Tudor and early Stuart royal families. It recognizes that customs and conventional expectations may to a large extent have concealed, or distorted the representation of, individual experiences. Thus kings customarily passed their sorrows in seclusion after the death of a spouse. (Monarchs occasionally sought to exercise this privilege more informally and less successfully when favourites died.) Accounts of how kings and queens behaved when they lost sons tended to emphasize manly fortitude and womanly sorrow, but also revealed more complex reactions. Condolences addressed to members of the royal family during this period shared certain conventional themes. New in James I's reign was the outpouring of verse in which the grief of the king, the queen and their children was sympathetically imagined by poets.     

Armenian Homelands and Homecomings, 1945–9

ABSTRACT

This article, based on research in the Armenian National Archives, focuses upon a neglected aspect of early Cold War history, the repatriation of diasporan Armenians to the Soviet Union (1945–9). I highlight the contested and historically conditioned nature of homelands, examining the multiple ways in which Soviet authorities and diaspora agencies attempted to authenticate Soviet Armenia as a ‘homeland’. Armenian constructions of homeland were transformed through the process of homecoming, and I examine attempts to reconcile the realities of life in the Soviet Union with diasporic visions of homeland based on an idealized national past.     

God's Tribunal: Guilt,Innocence, and Execution in England, 1675–1775

This paper explores the ways in which the early modern English execution functioned as a forum in which various, and often competing, notions of guilt and innocence were expressed. In the context of a culture which placed an inordinate emphasis on the significance of the behaviour and last dying words of men and women teetering on the brink of ‘Judgement and Eternity’, the gallows became, in essence, ‘God's tribunal – the site where solemn oaths and supernatural signs could trump the rulings of secular courts. And it was here that the condemned could proclaim not merely his or her individual innocence of a specific crime, but raise larger questions of relative societal guilt and sinfulness and social justice by invoking the disparity between man's justice and God's.     

Darts in England, 1900–39: A Social History. By Patrick Chaplin

ABSTRACT

This article examines the status and meanings of heterosexual love in post-war Britain. It is situated within the burgeoning field of the history of emotion and draws upon recent work on interiority and modern selfhood. It argues that love became a central plank in the quest for self-actualization in this period. It explains why love triumphed over pragmatism in the remaking of British matrimony and how this impacted upon the institution of marriage itself. The article posits the immediate post-war years as a time of significant discursive change and emotional instability: expectations rose and critical introspection deepened. The ways in which love was fashioned in the 1940s and 1950s were central to the dramatic social and cultural changes that occurred in the decades that followed.     

Sima Wensen: A Pioneer for China-France Cultural Exchange

Januarv. 27th, 2014 marked a mon- umental date. 50..years ago today,.. China and France issued a joint communique- and declared the estab- lishment of diplomatic ties. On June 6th, 1964, China and France success- fully established diplomatic relations, which ushered in a new era for the diplomacy of new China.     

Beyond the Rule of Thumb: The Materiality of Marital Violence in England c. 1700–1857

This article examines how marital violence was articulated in and around particular places, spaces, and objects, to reveal the tensions embedded in the physical structure of the household and its control. It also demonstrates that space and objects shaped marital violence both as an idea and an act and did ‘emotional work’ in the sense that they operated upon people’s emotions and behaviour. Finally, it argues that an imagined material culture of marital violence contributed to the construction and maintenance of class stereotypes.     

Coining Offences in England and Wales,c. 1675–1750: The Practical and the Personal

This article argues for a departure from previous conceptual frameworks that have categorised early modern coining offences as ‘social crimes’ similar to poaching, smuggling and riot. It seeks instead to complement the work undertaken by Malcolm Gaskill, Carl Wennerlind and Nicholas Tosney by contributing to their holistic interpretations of the offences from a variety of legal, economic and cultural perspectives. Through an analysis of elite views, cheap print, and the textual content of Mint depositions and trial summaries, this article argues that the ways in which contemporaries understood the practicalities of clipping, counterfeiting, and uttering as illicit depended largely on individual factors. These included the morality of work and labour, and specific roles and relationships of coiners.     

Post-War Cinema-Going and Working-Class Communities: A Case Study of the Holyland,Belfast, 1945–1962

This article utilizes oral history testimony to investigate cinema-going practices in the Holyland, a largely Protestant working-class community in post-war Belfast. It investigates the place-specific nature of cinema attendance, assesses the social practices of cinema-going and examines the reasons for the post-war decline in attendance and consequent cinema closures. Oral history testimony demonstrates the close link between the nature of cinema attendance, changes in the life cycle and urban mobility. By linking the recollections of post-war cinema-goers to broader social and economic developments in Belfast, and assessing Northern Ireland's relationship to the rest of the United Kingdom, this article investigates the reasons for the closure of the Apollo, the local neighbourhood cinema for residents of the Holyland.