

Although Liang Qichao is the subject of a research industry that covers many different aspects and stages of his intellectual and political career, the Hundred Day Reform remains the key event that launched his career and to this day, it continues to secure the historical significance of his name. Liang Qichao is a significant name in any general account of China's modern history because of its close association with the Hundred Day Reform of 1898, a major event in the narration of modern China. We tend to assume that our 'primary sources' will yield a certain fundamental and incontrovertible truth about the past, no matter which mode of interpretation we bring to bear upon them. Very often, the form that we regard as the most intimate and authoritative, namely the 'internal' perspectives that we seek to mine from the range of published and unpublished accounts produced by actual historical individuals themselves, assumes the privileged position of historical veracity. Rather, the point is to reflect on the different forms that sense making can take. It goes without saying that the point of posing these questions is not to encourage an unreflective response that affirms one particular account over other possible acts of historical representation.


Does our ability to relate the occurrence of events by providing the right kinds of textual documentation, and in adequate quantities, satisfy one or another norm of veracity acceptable to the profession? To what extent is veracity affected by the sequence according to which we order a certain set of events, the rhetorical operations we perform in the act of description, the decisions we make in either departing from or adhering to conventional and authoritative readings of a known historical topic? Thus, in the telling of any 'story' about Liang Qichao 梁启超, we are faced with the question of how we might locate historical veracity when it is contingent on one or another form of narrative structure.
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Historians, however, will also point out that the dictum of veracity must remain irreducible if historical narration is to be distinguishable as a work of professional scholarship from mere storytelling. It is commonplace nowadays to draw attention to the narrative structure of historical accounts and to note that a certain discursive contiguity exists between this mode of scholarship and storytelling. It is reproduced here with some minor revisions.- The Editor We checked the word origins against dictionaries such as Merriam-Webster and the Oxford English Dictionary.The following article was first published in East Asian History, No.21, June (2001) pp. To find common words with surprising origins, 24/7 Tempo reviewed several sources, including from Readable, EF Education, Medium, ELT Learning Journeys, and Good Housekeeping. )Ĭlick here to be surprised by the origins of some common English words ( Here are 30 everyday English words you didn”t know came from Arabic. Today, these words are so entrenched in English that it’s interesting to learn where they actually come from. Įuropeans also sailed across the globe, expanding to the new continent and other remote reaches, and bringing new ideas, foods, deities, and concepts back to the European continent and on to England. Speaking of Latin, here are Latin phrases everyone should know.

Even then, however, given that language is constantly evolving, the original meaning of some words is often far different from their current meaning (“surprise” itself has an interesting origin see below). Of course, it is not surprising that many English words have their origin in Latin or Greek or other European languages. Although the term was often associated with communism in Western culture during the last century, Communists of the Soviet Revolution used the Russian translation of “comrade” – “tovarisch.” The word “comrade” actually comes from Latin “camara,” in its earliest iteration meaning “vaulted room,” which evolved in European languages over time to mean someone who shares that room, hence a close companion. Well, “comrade,” I bet you always thought that word comes from Russian.
