Making History

Histories of the body have been powerfully shaped by the work of the French philosopher Michel Foucault who examined the ways in which the body was shaped by the medico-political space. Histories of the body intersect with the history of medicine and the history of science and might also interact with sensory history, the history of visual culture and the history of emotion.

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Analyses of space and place often intersect with history making. An increasing awareness of climate change has made some Australian historians particularly aware of the ways in which the landscape and the land might have shaped the Australian sense of ‘self’.’

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Women’s history closely aligns with cultural and social history in its inclusive approach. It emerged alongside the cultural turn in the 1990s as key-defining category of historical inquiry. Women’s history often analyses modes of private vs. public activity amongst women and the ways in which women negotiated gendered assumptions within the historical circles.

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The cultural ‘turn’ of the 1990s remains one of the most powerful influences in modern history writing. Cultural historians often emphasise everyday life within historical societies and rely on methodologies borrowed from anthropology.

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The history of civil rights in the US has been dominated by debates on the role of Martin Luther King. Some historians have argued for a longer history of civil rights extending from well before King’s speech. Such a history incorporates, for example, the work of the union movement amongst black workers in the 1940s North and South.

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Postcolonial histories generally focus on the relationship between the colonizing country and the colonized peoples (in this case, Japan and Koreans) in specific historical contexts. Themes of suffering and trauma often dominate postcolonial historiographical writing and they often contain pointed critiques of colonization as a model for the modern nation-state.

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Global histories began to appear in the 1990s though they emerged in response to the grand world histories of William McNeill some years earlier. They often address issues of race, empire and nation on a global scale and advocate the construction of multiple ‘globalizations’ in historical time and space.

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Transnational history challenges the rigid framework of national history. It examines history from the perspective of the global circulation of ideas and is particularly relevant to Australian historians seeking a broader, more expansive framework for their work.

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The historian was defined as scribe and astrologer in ancient China. He played a sophisticated role within the dynastic political culture of the Chinese historical past. The Chinese historian of today must come to grips with an enormous span of historical time and space as well as a rich culture of symbol and power.

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The great Greek historians, Herodotus (c. 484-420 BCE) and Thucydides (c.460-400 BCE) provided some of the most important models for historians until the modern period. History making in Ancient Greece was powerfully influenced by epic narrative and relied heavily on themes of war.

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