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History Wars (history + war)

Distribution by Scientific Domains
Humanities and Social Sciences100%

Selected Abstracts

Fred Wilson, PTSD, and Me: Reflections on the History Wars

CURATOR THE MUSEUM JOURNAL, Issue 4 2009
Ken Yellis
But if history is destined to be contested, where should museums be in that contest and how do we get there? Fred Wilson's Mining the Museum has turned out to be a path not taken; Enola Gay was a cautionary tale. But we should have these fights in museums, where the national narrative is blocked out and staged, because of how museums teach us, opening hidden windows on cloaked realities. Museums can start by becoming clearer about what they think they are doing when they make an exhibition. Exhibitions can have a profound effect on visitors at many levels but it doesn't happen very often. Is that because visitors seek another kind of experience from what we typically offer? [source]

Colonial Networks, Australian Humanitarianism and the History Wars

GEOGRAPHICAL RESEARCH, Issue 3 2006
ALAN LESTER
Abstract The ,History Wars' have brought contests among Britons over the colonisation of Aboriginal land and people to the forefront of public consciousness in Australia. These contests, however, were the result of trajectories that criss-crossed British imperial spaces, connecting Australia with other settler colonies and the British metropole. A number of historians and historical geographers have recently employed the notion of the network to highlight the interconnected geographies of the British Empire. This paper begins by examining the utility of such a re-conceptualisation. It then fleshes out empirically the networked nature of early nineteenth century humanitarianism in colonial New South Wales. Both the relatively progressive potential of this humanitarian network, and its complicity in an ethnocentric politics of assimilationism are analysed. Settler networks, developed as a counter to humanitarian influence in the colony, are also examined more briefly. This account of contested networks demonstrates that they were never simply about communication, but always, fundamentally, about the organisation and contestation of dispossessive trajectories that linked diverse colonial and metropolitan sites. The paper concludes by noting some of the implications of such a networked analysis of dispossession and assimilation for Australia's ,History Wars'. [source]

Patrick O'Farrell and the Irish History Wars, 1971,1993

JOURNAL OF RELIGIOUS HISTORY, Issue 1 2007
ELIZABETH MALCOLM
While Patrick O'Farrell's achievements as an historian of the Irish and of Catholicism in Australia are well recognised, little attention has been paid to his significance as an historian of Ireland. This article takes his two major Irish monographs, published in 1971 and 1975, and considers how they influenced leading Irish political historians of the 1970s and 1980s. In doing so, the article examines the crisis created for historians by the Northern Ireland Troubles. It demonstrates that the work of O'Farrell, which called into question the primacy of politics and of the nation state, helped open up new avenues for the analysis of Irish culture and identity. Yet, at the same time, such an approach challenged the republican reading of Irish history as a struggle against colonialism, and thus O'Farrell's work attracted severe criticism. [source]

Colonial Networks, Australian Humanitarianism and the History Wars

GEOGRAPHICAL RESEARCH, Issue 3 2006
ALAN LESTER
Abstract The ,History Wars' have brought contests among Britons over the colonisation of Aboriginal land and people to the forefront of public consciousness in Australia. These contests, however, were the result of trajectories that criss-crossed British imperial spaces, connecting Australia with other settler colonies and the British metropole. A number of historians and historical geographers have recently employed the notion of the network to highlight the interconnected geographies of the British Empire. This paper begins by examining the utility of such a re-conceptualisation. It then fleshes out empirically the networked nature of early nineteenth century humanitarianism in colonial New South Wales. Both the relatively progressive potential of this humanitarian network, and its complicity in an ethnocentric politics of assimilationism are analysed. Settler networks, developed as a counter to humanitarian influence in the colony, are also examined more briefly. This account of contested networks demonstrates that they were never simply about communication, but always, fundamentally, about the organisation and contestation of dispossessive trajectories that linked diverse colonial and metropolitan sites. The paper concludes by noting some of the implications of such a networked analysis of dispossession and assimilation for Australia's ,History Wars'. [source]