Suchergebnisse

"Aboriginal people have been able to use the courts to try to seek redress, particularly when political options have been limited. To do this they have had to use historical arguments, and as such history and historians have had to enter the courtroom. This highly original book brings together one of Australia's leading historians with two younger legal scholars to examine the ways in which history and the law have interacted in Australia. Far from being an abstract discussion, the book examines hundreds of federal court cases, interviewing judges, litigants, claimants and historians."--Provided by publisher

When the British government abolished slavery in the Caribbean and compensated the slave-owners, some of the beneficiaries and/or their children and grandchildren went to Australia to make a new life and if possible a new fortune. This essay traces the history of one such family, the Shiells of Montserrat, alongside two other contemporaneous histories – that of Yorkshire radical and convict, John Burkinshaw, and his family, into which one of the Shiells married, and that of the several Indigenous communities these families encountered. Through the experiences of these disparate and intersecting family groups, we can gain insight into both the lived experience and the wider imperial context of the expansion of Australian settler colonialism.

This article considers the divide between popular and academic history, especially as perceived by popular and academic historians. It argues that the two forms of history, though clearly connected to one another, have different priorities and audiences. In particular, where academic
historians prize originality of research, popular historians will tend to prize powerful storytelling. The article suggests that popular historians could acknowledge more handsomely that many do owe their debt to the research findings of academic historians, while in their turn academic historians
have much to learn from popular historians about how to communicate the pleasures and importance of understanding the past.

National history seems to be a form of history marked by a particularly strong relation between past and present. In the last few decades, the most serious historiographical conflicts, and the ones which have attracted public as well as scholarly attention, have tended to be those where national honour was felt to be at stake. Very often they have concerned either the foundation of the nation, or the national role in war, and sometimes both; think of the example of Japan, Israel, the United States, and Australia, to name just a few. These debates have attracted particular heat because history was seen to have implications not only for specialist historians but also for the morality and future of the nation.

While The Second Sex is usually taken as Simone de Beauvoir's major theoretical contribution to feminism, in the 1960s and 1970s it was very often through her autobiographies – especially Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter, The Prime of Life, and Force of Circumstance, along with novels such as She Came to Stay and The Mandarins – that her feminist ideas were most thoroughly absorbed. The autobiographies became nothing less than a guide for the fashioning of a new kind of feminine self. Where The Second Sex had intimated that a significant aspect of human liberation lay in women not losing their identity or their sense of self in those of men, it was the autobiographies which suggested and demonstrated in great detail how this might be done. In them, the rejection of conventional marriage and children was no mere slogan, but the foundation of what seemed to young female readers to be a fascinating and challenging life. In this paper, I reflect on de Beauvoir and her historical and contemporary relevance: first through reminiscence and re-reading of the autobiographies themselves; then with an historical examination of how they were read, taking Sydney, Australia, as my example; and finally by offering some reflections on subsequent feminist critique.