History

When American Verena Koehler and Russian Zinaida Duvankova swapped recipes for Mexican-style beef and piroshki in the early 1950s, it didn’t seem that either were aiming to spark a political discussion. The pen pals were curious about each other’s food and lives, and the everyday differences between the United States and the Soviet Union. Yet they soon saw similarities. Koehler remarked on a woman’s need for simple, fast recipes when she both works and carries out domestic labour at home. Duvankova agreed – even as a Soviet state official, she completed a full day at work and returned home to all of the housework. As she wrote to Koehler, ‘You are a woman, and can well understand what it means to attend to a family of three.’

It is common today for historians to describe what they do as telling stories about the lives and events of the past, using the narrative techniques that they share with fiction writers: describing place, weather, clothes, the set of a leading character’s chin, and so on. But as a disciplined, evidence-based enquiry, history writing is also about argument and interpretation.

As Mark Twain tells the story in Following the Equator (1897), Cecil Rhodes, the future magnate and politician, was down and out in Sydney in 1870. Wandering along a harbour beach, he stopped to help a fisherman land and gut a shark – in whose stomach cavity he discovered a fragment of newsprint that, days in advance of sailing ships carrying the same papers, announced the outbreak of the Franco-Prussian War. Galvanised by this intelligence, Rhodes convinced a local wool broker to lend him the money to buy up much of that year’s Australian woolclip, a purchase that helped the future poster boy of Empire get back in the game.

What can a reader expect from the ‘shortest’ history of anything? Probably something that gives basic information about that subject with a possible admixture of humour and a fresh approach that conceals the gaps that brevity inevitably produces. Mart Kuldkepp’s shortest history of Scandinavia achieves these goals skilfully and can be trusted to provide the general reader with a reliable narrative. It also succeeds in analysing what it is about the countries that we call Scandinavia that makes them special, creating a sense of ‘Nordicness’ that is recognised by both insiders and outsiders.

Of all the revolutionary regimes of the modern era, few sought to remake society as radically as Communist  China during the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution. Launched by Mao Zedong in 1966 to purge ‘class enemies’ and revitalise socialist ideals, the movement quickly spiralled into widespread upheaval that slipped beyond the Party’s control. Amid mass campaigns and brutal struggles, waves of political activism surged from below, jolting the very foundations of the Communist state and reshaping the country’s cultural and political landscape.

The First Cold War is an account of 300 years of British-Russian relations, from mutual incomprehension to the Anglo-Russian Convention of 1907, which reached an accommodation between the great powers. This proved remarkably stable and provided the basis for resisting German aggression in the twentieth century. It only ended in 1949 when the next cold war began.

The history of the Pilbara is distinctive, but its contours are those of Australian history in miniature. Successive resource booms have saddled that part of Western Australia with the weight of immense national expectation. The rise and fall of trade unionism was compressed into a few short decades in the Pilbara’s iron ore mines, where compulsory unionism once made workers immensely powerful, and where the decline in union membership now leaves them highly exposed to managerial agendas.

On the evening of Boxing Day 1900, a spectacular pantomime premiered at Her Majesty’s Theatre in Sydney in honour of the imminent federation of the Australian colonies. A theatrical ‘extravaganza’, Australis presented an image of the fledging nation one hundred years hence. In the pantomime’s vision, Australia in the year 2000 is ruled by a former trade unionist, ‘the Boss’, who leads an expedition to annex Antarctica, forming a ‘Great Empire of the South’. One advantage of this move, notes the Boss, is that the capital of the Australian empire can be located on the geographic south pole, thus resolving the dispute between Sydney and Melbourne. Clearly, the pantomime’s librettists (who included theatrical entrepreneur J.C. Williamson) were not above political satire. What Australis also suggests is that there existed genuine popular enthusiasm for an Australian Antarctic empire.