Turner's concept of the frontier as the central theme in American History has proved to be one of the most formative forces in the development of American historiography. Even the critics, whether they completely rejected or partially accepted Turner's thesis, have been forced to reappraise the basic factors in American social and political history. At least to that extent they were influenced by Turner.

When a generation ago G. W. J. Drewes brought to a close his trailblazing study of Javanese millenarian concepts he predicted their decline. As a propaganda device in the arena of modern politics they might perhaps retain some value, he believed, but their inherent strength and uniqueness would gradually diminish. Perhaps Drewes' philological pre-occupation led him to neglect the anthropological dynamics of the messianic currents that he studied in the Javanese religious records. In any event his prediction seemed to assume that the efficacy of the millenarian expectations as propaganda could be independent of the enduring cultural matrix of which these expectations are an inseparable part. Far from losing their inherent vitality the messianic ideas of the Javanese have, as the following pages will argue, remained strong and influential; only the cultural forms by which they are nowadays expressed have changed. In this analysis attention will first be paid to the traditional cosmology of the Javanese as it is reflected in their major cultural motifs. Next the impact of Hindu-Indian, Islamic and Western (both religious and secular) influences on this cosmology will be considered. Finally, the nature of the messianic expectations in the Javanese experience will be described, also in terms of their contemporary manifestations.

The newly awakened interest in the comparative study of politics is part and parcel of a silent revolution that has taken place in the social sciences during the last decades. Such a re-orientation in turn is in part due to the radical social and political transformations in this era of total wars and revolutions. Because as Aristotle knew all too well, and peaceful periods in history all too often tried to forget, the social sciences are disciplines of “ethics”, spelling out man's deep involvements and demanding decisions at critical turning points of history.

In religion, in art, in all spheres of culture and politics, the mass of mankind in all hitherto known societies have not, except for transitory interludes, been preoccupied with the attainment of an immediate contact with the ultimate principles implicit in their beliefs and standards. The directly gratifying ends of particular actions, the exigencies of situations, considerations of individual and familial advantage, concrete moral maxims, concrete prescriptions and prohibitions, preponderate in the conduct of the majority of persons in most societies, large and small. The systemic coherence and the deeper and more general ground of beliefs and standards only intermittently hold their attention and touch on their passions. Ordinary life in every society is characterized by an unequal intensity of attachment to ultimate values, be they cognitive, moral, or aesthetic, and an unequal intensity of the need for coherence. Ordinary life shuns rigorous definition and consistent adherence to traditional or rational rules, and it has no need for continuous contact with the sacred. Ordinary life is slovenly, full of compromise and improvisation; it goes on in the “here and now”.

In the Journal of Cycle Research (7:43–48, April, 1958) S.W. and N.E. Gray published “Evidence for a 400-Year Cycle in Human Ability”, which might have been more accurately called “Human Achievement” since ability refers to potential, but the 25,000 lives they reviewed were finished and realized. They took the names of historic personages listed in the 1935 edition of the Columbia Encyclopedia and classified them, without rating or ranking, each as an equivalent unit, according to their occurrence in time; or, more exactly, counting how many individuals, eminent enough to have won inclusion in this encyclopedia, were alive in each decade between 500 B.C. and A.D. 1800. The authors recognize that essentially their data do not cover “human history”, but “the western world and its Mediterranean fringes”.

It appears to be characteristic of a very large number of societies that from time to time movements arise in opposition to the established religious institutions, offering either new means of attaining the benefits offered by the established religion or new interpretations of its dogmas. The leaders of these movements often claim to have received direct revelation from supernatural sources, and for that reason are frequently called prophets, though this name is of wider application, embracing also such persons as the Hebrew prophets, whose chief function appears to have been that of moral criticism, and also the givers of oracles who have a recognized place in some established systems. There is no reason to suppose that the movements of this kind which appear among non-European peoples subject to European rule form a class by themselves, but, owing to the circumstances in which ethnographic information has been collected, the bulk of this refers to subject peoples, and among such peoples religious movements are largely concerned with the relations between subject and ruler.

Dr. Mair's feeling of inconclusiveness, after an examination of so much material, comes, I believe, from a failure to choose the right units. Anthropologists have traditionally dealt only with those cults which arose among primitive – that is, preliterate – peoples in situations of contact with advanced cultures. They have left to historians the discussion of cults within part-literate societies in the past, and to sociologists, social psychologists and psychiatrists the study of contemporary cult phenomena in modern literate societies. Recent work in the narrowly defined anthropological studies has made possible the delineation of differences attributable to culture area, date and conditions of culture contact, and discrimination between the retrospective orientation of American Indian nativistic cults, like the Ghost Dance, and the future-oriented cults of the Southwest Pacific, the Cargo cults. Dr. Mair discusses a third regional type, the cults of South Africa. Such organization of materials by period and area does make it possible to demonstrate that cults differ in form and content, in different times and different places. They do not help us isolate the universals involved. The area frame of reference gives no detail about the specific tribal situation, the personality of the leader and the other personnel of the cult. It is too large for detailed psychological explanation of social process, and too narrow for the understanding of cult formation as a social process.

How to account for the courtly love complex of the troubadours and minnesingers has been an unsolved puzzle ever since the romanticists discovered it as a scholarly problem. For about three generations, in the 12th and 13th centuries, Provençal and German lyrical poetry was preoccupied with a strangely uneven love pattern. In the classic version of this poetry, the male lover presents himself as engrossed in a yearning desire for the love of an exceedingly beautiful and perfect woman whose strange emotional aloofness and high social status make her appear hopelessly distant. But the frustrated and sorrowful lover cannot overcome his fascination and renders faithful “love service” to this “high-minded” and exacting lady who reciprocates in a surprising manner: She does not grant him the amorous “reward” which he craves, but she gives him what immeasurably increases his “worth”: She rewards him with approval and reassurance. The great lady accepts him as being worthy of her attention, but only at the price of behavioral restraint and refinement of manners, that is, at the price of courtois behavior. As the contemporaries put it, courtoisie is the result of courtly love.

The time seemed propitious for the establishment of a government of law in Serbia at the beginning of 1830. Between the end of 1828 and the autumn of 1830 Prince Miloš of Serbia created a so-called “legislative commission” to translate the Code Napoléon into Serbian and codify the laws and customs of the country. In January 1830 he solemnly advised a great national assembly that he had obtained an imperial edict from the Sultan ending all direct obligations of Serbian peasants to their former Turkish lords, guaranteeing Ottoman recognition of Serbian autonomy in most matters of internal administration, and offering Serbia the prospect of territorial aggrandizement, as well as the express right to institute schools, courts, and a governmental administration of her own. Shortly thereafter the Serbian envoys to St. Petersburg returned to Serbia and made it known that the Tsar-Protector had supposedly expressed the view that every state should have an “organic charter”. The able and enlightened Count Paul Kiselev, Russian Governor of the Rumanian principalities of Wallachia and Moldavia, had moreover just endowed these provinces with “Organic Statutes”

Social mobility in traditional China, particularly during the last two dynasties, Ming (1368–1644) and Ch'ing (1644–1911), for which ample data are available, deserves systematic study by both Chinese and Western historians and social scientists. It is remarkable to observe that in a meticulously “regulated” society such as traditional China's, there was probably a greater amount of vertical mobility, both upward and downward, than is usually found in pre-modern and modern societies of the West. What makes this more striking is the fact that it occurred in a society which for twenty-five centuries believed in the inequality of men. For this reason alone the question of social mobility in traditional China should be of more than usual interest to theoretical sociologists with a comparative approach to their subject. Owing to the author's limited knowledge of Western sociology and also because of limitations of space, this article deals mainly with China, although brief comparisons with pre-modern and modern Western societies will be attempted at certain points.

The rapidly mounting Occidental pressure that China felt after 1800, and her evident need of new devices to meet it, faced the Chinese intellectual with hard decisions. His reactions become more understandable if we consider them in the context of his history – a context of which he was particularly aware, since his training and his approach to political problems were strongly historical. His position had not always been as secure as it seemed ostensibly in 1800; his outlook and even his identity had undergone several transformations before he arrived at the Confucian orthodoxy of the Manchu period. Two centuries after Confucius, the dominant thinkers were power-oriented Legalists, eclipsed by the Confucians only after permanently discrediting themselves through their brutally oppressive methods of unifying government and thought. After the 2nd century, Confucian ardor declined; intellectual leadership (and an important share of political influence) had passed to essentially anti-political Taoists and anti-worldly Buddhists. The Confucianists of the 10th and 11th centuries established their intellectual primacy and unchallenged political leadership only through an intense ideological struggle with these rivals.

Current population theory depends heavily on the hypothesis that a demographic revolution occurred in West European countries roughly between 1750 and 1880. According to this hypothesis, European death rates averaged at least 35 per 1,000 prior to 1750; hence, even very high birth rates did not enable populations to recover rapidly from the effects of catastrophes, which are supposed to have been frequent and intense. Only after the advances, mainly hygienic, which began about 1750 did the death rate commence a long-term decline. Because fertility remained high, West European populations grew more rapidly than they had ever done. Eventually, urbanization and industrialization sapped the forces which maintainted high birth rates, and low fertility became the major cause of low Western rates of growth.Since currently under-developed populations have high vital rates, it has been suggested that demographic principles are transcultural and that Western demographic patterns will be repeated.

In spite of all the complex controversies concerning the interplay of religious ideas and economic forces at the end of the Middle Ages the investigation of the pre-existing medieval poor law has been rather neglected by modern scholars. Evidently enough attitudes toward the relief of poverty are as significant as attitudes toward the acquisition of wealth in gauging the climate of economic thought in any given age. Yet, apart from studies on hospital administration, little has been done in this field of medieval research since the pioneering works of Ratzinger, Emminghaus, Ehrle, Uhlhorn and Ashley in the nineteenth century. Since then the attitudes of social welfare experts to the problems of poor relief have radically changed and a great mass of source material unknown to the earlier writers, notably the work of the medieval canonists, has come to the attention of historians. Both these facts suggest a need for some reconsideration of medieval attitudes to the poor and to the relief of poverty.

The Chinese scholar-official had long constituted a special type of iron-clad intelligentsia, firmly based on the Confucian tradition and accustomed to rule China with unchallenged authority. This tradition was threatened for the first time in 1838 with the outbreak of the “Opium” or First Anglo-Chinese War. Outwardly, this was a simple military defeat by a “barbarian” force on one frontier of China, remote from the capital and court at Peking. As such it was nothing new in Chinese history. Hsiung-nu, Toba Tartars, Mongols and Manchus had threatened and overrun Chinese borders through the centuries. To most articulate Chinese both this and successive assaults on China through the nineteenth century, were adequately explained by the traditional and reassuring formula.

The islands of Puerto Rico and Jamaica, which lie roughly at the same latitude and less than 600 miles apart at their nearest points, share a number of remarkable similarities in general physical environment. Strikingly in contrast to the similarities in topography, climate, flora and fauna are the differences in the cultures of the two islands. One of the reasons for this cultural disparity has to do not with the cultures of the colonial powers, but with the persistence of a strong peasantry in one island (Jamaica), and a relatively weak peasantry in the other (Puerto Rico). This difference stems in large part from the individual histories of the two islands, histories predominantly determined by the colonial aims and policies of, in one case, Spain and Great Britain; in the other, Spain and the United States. The present paper purports to treat principally one brief period (1800–1850) during which a sharp divergence in the colonial objectives of the respective controlling powers affected the cultures of Jamaica and Puerto Rico accordingly. It was during this half-century that Puerto Rico repeated a historical experience which Jamaica had undergone nearly 150 years earlier: the development of a sugar plantation economy.

This paper is intended merely to frame certain hypotheses and present some comparisons and contrasts which may stimulate discussion.

Two irrevocable commitments of Spanish colonial policy were that the natives as “new Christians” merited some guarantees as to their property rights and the liberty of their persons and that colonizing based upon the services of Indian labor had to be made profitable for the Spanish colonists. The Spanish crown seldom vacillated in its sometimes quixotically pursued determination to reconcile these two cardinal commitments. Harmonized they sometimes were, but there are striking cases where the two goals seemed mutually exclusive. The aim of this essay is to examine some patterns of change and continuity which emerged during those periods of crisis when the general well-being of the colony apparently clashed with the specific welfare of the Indians.

The West Indian area is one of the most attractive fields for comparative study. For, as Dr. Mintz has pointed out, it includes territories, generally similar in physical environment, which, nevertheless, differ in their individual histories. The marked divergence in the histories of Puerto Rico and Jamaica during the first half of the nineteenth century is only one instance among many which can be cited as worthy of attention. The interest of this particular case is that it raises the point in an acute form.

A twentieth century social scientist is bound to be impressed by this paper and it should drive him back to ask more fundamental questions about modern social legislation. He will, however, be bound to feel a little disappointed by the fact that the same degree of scholastic rigour has not been applied to the ideas of modern social legislators as has been applied to those of the Decretists.