History
Christopher Menz reviews 'Australia: A German traveller in the age of gold' by Friedrich Gerstäcker
Formerly only known to historians and specialists, either in the original German or the author's abridged translation, Friedrich Gerstäcker's Australian travelogue (1854), based on ...
... (read more)Glyn Davis reviews 'Britain's Europe: A thousand years of conflict and cooperation' by Brendan Simms
For elections in Britain, the polling stations stay open until late, with counting through to dawn. So it was a sleepless night for many on Thursday, 23 June 2016 ...
... (read more)Stephanie Trigg reviews 'The History of Emotions: An Introduction' by Jan Pampler and translated by Keith Tribe
A year or so after I had begun my work in the Australian Research Council's Centre of Excellence for the History of Emotions, the immortal words of 'Ern Malley', 'The emotions are not skilled workers', bored a hole into my brain, dug around a bit, and settled there as a perpetual irritant. Malley's phrase has an oblique genealogy. Coined by James McAuley and Harold ...
Norman Etherington reviews 'The Princeton Companion to Atlantic History' Edited by Joseph C. Miller
Atlantic history and the closely related phrase 'Atlantic World' refer to a geographical/historical way of thinking about interactions among peoples of Europe, Africa, and the Americas between about 1500 and 1900. Practitioners of Atlantic history, like other scholars washed up from the wreck of nation-based historical writing, find it impossible to comprehend the p ...
At the very bottom of Hell, Dante represents Satan with three mouths, each of which endlessly devours a figure personifying treachery and rebellion against God. One of these, predictably enough, is Judas. What may be surprising to the modern reader is that the other two are Brutus and Cassius, the assassins of Julius Caesar. In the medieval vision of the universe an ...
#1 Martin Thomas reads ‘“Because it’s your country”: Bringing Back the Bones to West Arnhem Land'
Monday, 21 December 2015In 2013 we published Martin Thomas's Calibre Prize-winning essay ‘“Because it’s your country”: Bringing Back the Bones to West Arnhem Land'. This powerful story of the repatriation of Aboriginal bones soon became the best read article on our website and we are delighted to be able to launch the ABR podcast with it.
... (read more)Had it not been for the leadership of Winston Churchill in 1940, Nazi Germany would in all probability have won World War II. The most enthusiastic revisionist historian would grudgingly accept this proposition.
As this highly readable account by London Mayor Boris Johnson shows, 1940 was the high point of a career that extended from the 1890s to the 1960s. ...
Sarah Dempster reviews 'The English Country House in Literature' edited by Geoffrey G. Hiller
Outwardly safe, aristocratic, and uncontroversial, the English country house seems suitably benign coffee-table material to leaf through on a drowsy Sunday afternoon. However, while the story of the English country house is certainly steeped in nostalgia and privilege, it is also a narrative of exclusion, exploitation, and decline. Geoffrey G. Hiller engages with ea ...
Glenn Moore reviews 'The Half Has Never Been Told' by Edward E. Baptist
There is something pleasurable about a good American history book. I recall reading David Hackett Fischer's Paul Revere's Ride (1994) on a train journey from Boston to Washington. I read it not because I was teaching about Paul Revere, but because it was a fine work, true to a tradition in which, as Fischer put it, books 'are a sequence of stories, with hig ...
1606 was a rough year for England. In late 1605 the Gunpowder plotters nearly blew up the government; a Catholic rebellion in Warwickshire sharpened the country's fear. England's ports were closed and an army raised; bonfires lit the streets of London and guards manned the city gates. Later, the Tower drew its bridge and loaded cannons upon the (false) report of Kin ...