Suchergebnisse

History is a key site for the negotiation of national identity, with the ability to define the past shaping the national narrative on who "we" were, who "we" are, and, crucially, who "we" should be. As such, the teaching of history is a site of intense political debate. This paper examines the history module of the Australian Curriculum to understand the extent to which the history curriculum moves beyond Eurocentric, colonial imaginings of Australia's history towards a more inclusive, multi‐cultural, globally‐oriented, cosmopolitan vision of society. Both the curriculum and teaching resources were examined to ascertain the identities and orientations these materials could provide. The research finds that — despite improvements in presenting a diversity of representations, in particular a positive focus on the rights and contributions of Indigenous peoples in Australia and some orientation to diverse migrant histories, the environment, and Asia — the main thrust of the curriculum is a focus on the nation‐state at the expense of global engagement. The funnel structure which deals with broader world history in earlier years, relegates the rest of the world to a temporal and spatial distance, leaving a somewhat myopic narrative that perpetuates traditional, Anglo‐centric narratives, maintaining the perspectives of "Others" as peripheral.

Few intellectual histories of France by non-French authors in recent years have produced the bitter polemic that Tony Judt's Past Imperfect: French intellectuals (1944–1956) elicited. Published in French at the same time as the English edition in 1992, the book was held to account for its questionable historiographical legitimacy, alleged inaccuracy in the treatment of sources, and not-so-hidden partisanship, even if it also received some positive reviews from authoritative specialists in the field in important national newspapers. Nevertheless, the general tone and content of the French academic reviews were largely negative, and in many ways this response was unsurprising: how could a study arguing that a certain dominant (and still alive) Jacobin philosophical tradition was characterized by a "marked absence of a concern with public ethics or political morality" be read otherwise? Further, in an often caustic style, Judt accused the postwar French intellectuals of being seduced by totalitarian tendencies. Such charge, not surprisingly, provoked a pointed defence of the intellectual and historiographical national sensibility, which was not above resorting to Continental stereotypes against the "Anglo-Saxon" cultural model. Nor was the negative reception surprising to Judt, who positioned himself explicitly in the text as an outsider, belonging to a different intellectual tradition. It is useful to remember this uproar today as one considers new books by Gisèle Sapiro and François Dosse, as it illustrates three important issues in a lively academic register: the continuity of a French approach to intellectual history, its difference from Anglo-American traditions, and a possible—although mediated—angle for understanding the nature of this French particularism, through the discussion of the historiographic projection of the idea of intellectual status.

World history can provide a context for regional and national histories, but what is
the context for world history itself? If world history is about the history of human
beings, asking this question means asking about the place of human beings within modern
knowledge. While most traditional cosmologies put humans at the center of the
picture, the temporal and spatial scales of modern science are so vast that humans can
seem to vanish entirely. Yet if we order the contents of our universe by complexity
rather than by size or longevity, things look different. This paper explores arguments
suggesting that human societies and their evolution may be among the most complex
objects available for scientific study. Such conclusions hint at the significance of world
history beyond the history profession and also suggest the extraordinary difficulty of the
challenges world historians face.

This paper reviews the history of human economic activity from the time Homo sapiens appeared to the present. The first aim is to provide a coherent narrative of the economic history of this period. The second aim is to quantify economic activities where time series data is available and to use economic theory to explain the trends and turning points. It examines the history of three central time series – the aggregate human population, output per capita and human‐induced species extinctions. It concludes with some brief observations on the contribution of Big Economic History to Big Human History.

Abstract I use the idea of consumption to discuss questions of agency and purpose in history. History, as a consumer of pasts, is itself an agent in the interpretive strategies employed in the construction of a historical narrative. History also consumes people as it attempts to impose its homogenizing narrative. In these senses, there is purpose: to give order and meaning to—thus prioritizing—certain pasts over others and to define commonality—especially of the nation or nation-state—and thus marginality. This view brings out the historicity of history: that there is always contestation in representations of the past, and that there is considerable variability in how individuals make such history meaningful to themselves. The latter brings out another notion of consumption—that individuals consume history. Which parts of history people imbibe, however, depend on connections with their experience, their own pasts and histories. In terms of pedagogy, we must be aware that objectivistic history often meets resistance, invites parody, or fosters disbelief. If one goal of teaching history is to foster belief in the nation-state, then a monological narrative might not be the best way to accomplish that goal.(History; Education; Nation)

"Scours the history of the Cold War, from the end of World War II to the end of the Soviet Union, for clues as to why Americans and Russians think about each other the way they do and how the Cold War's legacies affect present politics and popular consciousness in both countries"--