
42 杜正勝 新史學十三卷三期
democracy in a moderat e, rational manner.
Following the mid-1980s the historical community in Taiwan witnessed
yet another new wave, and the study of cultural history based on investigations
in socio-economics began to take shape. In 1990, a time when the collapse of
communist power was still in progress and Taiwan's martial law had just been
lifted, a group of Taiwanese historians launched the Journal of New History.
Possessive of an optimistic attitude towards the new era and new expectations
for the realization of their professionalism, the founders of the Journal had
exerted the best of their efforts to uphold the tradition of applying new
methodologies and new materials and to look for major breakthroughs in the
realm of historical studies. This was the intrinsic impetus in the discipline.
The 1990s was a decade when Taiwan entered the age of true democracy,
and the subjectivity of the people of Taiwan was on the rise at the same time.
To be sure, the drastic change brought unprecedented impact to the study of
history in Taiwan, and the validity of history education and historical
interpretation that had been China-centered for half a century had to be
re-examined. With the disintegration of the rigid interpretative framework,
Taiwan's historians must move on to advance their scholarship. Yet, the
question remains: what is the next step, anyway? While the debate on how
historians should prepare themselves for the next step has become a politically
sensitive issue, it appears that historians in the next wave of the New History
Movement will not confine themselves to explorations in historical crafts.
They are likely to pursue a more liberal mentality that will help them get rid of
the bondage molded by the Chin a-centered pattern of histor ical interpretation
and re-construct a global historical outlook, one that will usher in yet another
horizon in continued, substantative historical research.
Keywords: New history, Fu Ssu-nien, Shen Kang-po, Historical
methods, Post-modernism