New Research Direction Of American Scholar On Chinese Urban History Studies

Since the1980’s, the urban history of China has become a heated subject for overseas and especially American scholars who are specialized in the issues in China. One of the basic thoughts of this thesis is to take popular culture as a research direction, based on a systematic introduction to this academic branch and the theories involved, and focused on American academic circles’ researches on the urban history of Shanghai, to observe the formation background and urban experience of and scholars’ attitudes towards this new direction, and the important social and cultural concerns expressed in the works about this direction; explore the factors concerning the research direction and trend changes in the history of historical research such as social transformation and academic thoughts, and the problems of how different investigators internalize these factors into the academic distinction of the reform of historical research, and of how American historians specialized in the issues in China reflect through their books the history of the pop culture of Shanghai.Chapter One is Mainly an Exploration of the " Popular cultural orientation","Urban history","History of Shanghai" and other concepts, the significance and the method of this Dissertation Based on the investigation.Chapter Two is about a new history of workers, investigating a new social history characteristic of class nature, interviewing workers, getting to know about how the common people in Shanghai worked, lived and resisted against the capitalists, reconstructing the labor stratum in Shanghai, and reflecting a new tendency for scholars to do researches on the history of Shanghai from grass-root class.Chapter Three is about the ignored social groups, paying attention to the problem of how the different marginalized populations who were ignored in previous historical researches struggle for survival and live in multi-social networks, paying attention again to the relationship between a state and society, regarding social network as a motivator, and paying attention to a state’s oppressive ability.Chapter Four investigates different modern aspects of Shanghai from the perspective of commercial and consumption culture, with the two books and two theses collections published in1999as materials, explores the process, contents and significance of the transformation of popular culture research direction after ridding of researches on different classes and populations.Chapter Five is about the popular culture research in the history of economy and economic ethics, with scholars’ researches on the department stores existing in different periods of time as the objects of investigation, to sort out the transformation of research direction from official businessman to corporate culture and finally to pop culture, seek the research direction from "imperialist" logic to pop culture in the researches on the history of enterprise, and explore the acceptance and response of the history of economic culture in the urban evolution of Shanghai from the perspective of economic ethics rather than economic history.Chapter Six is about popular culture research, sorting out the Ph.D. thesis research in this field, exploring books about the history of film which is the deeper section of the Ph.D. theses, analyzing and giving comments on two Ph.D. theses on the art of "Suzhou Pingtan", and finding different popular culture research methods.Chapter Seven, Mainly Summarizes several approaches to Popular Culture as a Research Direction of American Scholar on Shanghai History Studies, and Makes some Criticism and Reflection on the study of overseas considerable scholarship.