Contents -- List of Contributors -- Introduction -- Time, History, and Moral Responsibility -- Chapter One Negativity and Historicist Time: Facticity and Intellectual History of the 1930s -- Chapter Two Ontological Optimism, Cosmological Confusion, and Unstable Evolution: Tan Sitong's Renxue and Zhang Taiyan's Response -- Chapter Three Nation, History and Ethics: The Choices of Post-Imperial Historiography in China -- Chapter Four Reading Takeuchi Yoshimi and Reading History -- The Burden of the Past and the Hope for a Better Future -- Chapter Five An Eschatological View of History: Yoshimi Takeuchi in the 1960s -- Chapter Six The Campaign to Criticize Lin Biao and Confucius (批林批孔) and the Problem of "Restoration" in Chinese Marxist Historiography -- Recollection of the Past and the Popularization of History -- Chapter Seven Popular Readings and Wartime Historical Writings in Modern China -- Chapter Eight Figuring History and Horror in a Provincial Museum: The Water Dungeon, the Rent Collection Courtyard, and the Socialist Undead -- History and the Definition of Spatial, Cultural and Temporal Boundaries -- Chapter Nine Revolution as Restoration: Meanings of "National Essence" and "National Learning" in Guocui Xuebao -- Chapter Ten Temporality of Knowledge and History Writing in Early Twentieth-Century China. Liu Yizheng and A History of Chinese Culture -- Index.