Table of contents for Vol 59 No 3 2024 in Agora

Causes of the French Revolution Robert Darnton’s latest book, The Revolutionary Temper: Paris, 1748–1789, investigates the creation of a revolutionary culture in Paris in the forty years before 1789.1 In a series of path-breaking books across his long career, Darnton has changed the way we understand the Enlightenment and its impact. He did this by asking a simple but difficult question: what did people want to read in the late eighteenth century? Darnton enriches his analysis by placing the history of publishing and reading within a wider context. He evokes in captivating detail the public hunger for innovation and critique. He takes us into the streets and cafés of Paris, a congested cauldron of debate, friction and sometimes riot. Side-by-side with elite language of birth, privilege and obligation emerged a…

In his 1966 monograph Res Publica Amissa (‘The Lost Republic’), Christian Meier famously defined the final crisis of the Republic in the age of Caesar as a ‘Krise ohne Alternative’ (a ‘crisis without alternative’). Meier argued that the customs and institutions that had served Rome well as a city-state were no longer fit for purpose for a large empire, and that the conservative Roman elite simply lacked the imagination and the intellectual framework to adjust the Roman body politic to the changed geopolitical circumstances. As a result, the senatorial aristocracy doggedly held onto obsolete forms and methods, to their own detriment and that of their beloved Republic. A few examples should suffice to bust this influential myth. Between 367 and 287 BCE, the Senate and the popular assemblies carried a…

On 3 December 2008, the Victorian government unveiled the ‘Great Petition’, a 20-metre-long bluestone and steel monument commemorating the colony’s 1891 ‘monster’ suffrage petition. The event concluded Australia’s ‘long’ suffrage centenary decade (1994–2008), an era peppered with state and federal anniversaries, each prompting reflections on feminist pasts and futures as well as a deluge of scholarship on the structure, tactics and ideologies of the suffragist coalitions. Despite the enthusiasm for once ‘forgotten’ histories that now occupy pride of place in a rejuvenated story about the nation’s egalitarian tradition, the suffragists remain marginalised in commemorative landscapes. Denizens of Sydney and Hobart will struggle to find public acknowledgements of these feminist foremothers, while Canberra’s Centenary of Women’s Suffrage Commemorative Fountain—a replacement for a sculpture planned for the city’s land-axis but cancelled by…

In your History lessons, have you advised students never to use the word ‘I’ in essays? You are not alone. Under the heading ‘Objectivity in Academic Writing’, the University of British Columbia advises: Academic writing is formal in tone and meant to be objective, using cited sources to support an argument or position. This assumes the focus is not the author, but rather the writing.1 The ‘objective’, dispassionate scholarly writing voice has been a long-established norm in universities and schools. A ‘formal’ and ‘objective’ tone was considered a testament to the gravitas and intellectual independence of scholarly writing. Hamilton College (New York) warns: ‘Most historians write in the third person, which focuses the reader on the subject. If you write in the first person singular, you shift the focus to…

‘The South Australian Frontier and its Legacies’ website and its interactive Story Map are valuable resources for anyone interested in deepening their understanding of the nature, extent and duration of violent interactions between Aboriginal people and Europeans in the colonial period.1 The website employs a broad definition of violence to capture the diverse forms of conflict that occurred as a direct result of European occupation of Aboriginal Country. Although aimed at the general public, the website also hosts a ‘Learning Resources’ page developed in conjunction with History teachers for educators and secondary school students. Since Aboriginal people’s and colonists’ experiences varied from colony to colony and region to region, the ‘Frontier Regions’ page has tabs for seven distinct geographical regions with introductory essays that outline variations in the nature, extent…

When the first reports of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine broke in February 2022, most experts on Russia were in a state of shock. This included historians. I had spent that summer convinced the warnings from the intelligence community were unfounded because a full-scale war in Ukraine would be a suicidal choice for President Vladimir Putin. Having lived for much of the past decade between Moscow, Budapest and London as a graduate researcher in East European Studies departments alongside colleagues from the region, the Russian invasion was a traumatic event that marked a turning point in my understanding of the country. It also had colossal implications for historians working on Russia, Eastern Europe and Central Asia, bringing a new-found urgency to the agenda of decolonising the history of the Soviet…

The Opium Wars of the mid-nineteenth century remain among the few topics about Chinese and East Asian history that most Australian students have some knowledge about. Among other things, they symbolise the disparity between the ‘West’ and the ‘rest’ in industrial capacity and technological sophistication. The conventional historical narrative has explained that the West established its economic superiority through the Industrial Revolution at home, and then expanded its political domination over the rest of the world through colonialism, of which the Opium Wars constituted a part. One crucial scholarly debate related to this narrative is the ‘Great Divergence’ debate, which forces us to rethink the origins of Europe’s modern economic growth and its relationship with colonial expansion overseas. The ‘California School’ and The Great Divergence Traditionally most people, including historians,…

What is history education for? If you had asked this question of a school teacher in the early twentieth century, the answer might have been something like this: If our teaching is of the right sort, the pupil should arrive at an intelligent pride in his race and its institutions; he should be inspired with a lofty admiration for the men who have won for us our liberties, who have made our race pre-eminent in the industrial world.1 As this extract from a 1914 Education Department of Western Australia curriculum document shows, history education was unashamedly didactic and ideological. It was a confident endeavour, grounded in a faith in objective knowledge and expertise. The role of History teachers was to impart a ‘training in citizenship’ by inculcating in students the…

Educators operate in an environment with an often contradictory research base and a plethora of widely held falsehoods. For the time-poor it is hard to separate truth from myth. This article will identify some common beliefs that do not stand up to scrutiny. Learning Styles One of the most common myths is the idea that students learn according to three (or more) different ‘styles’: visual, auditory and kinaesthetic.1 Research has demonstrated that even if students have a preference for a certain teaching method, teaching them in that method does not increase learning more than business-as-usual. While teaching in a variety of ways is potentially interesting and therefore possibly more engaging, learning styles are not real. Moreover, the interpretation of learning style preference makes no sense. If a student says they…

It would be no exaggeration to describe the past decade as a period of great political tumult in the United States. The demonisation of political opponents, the collapse of confidence in traditional institutions and the looming threat of political violence have all become entwined in the nation’s political culture. The failed assassination attempt on former president Donald Trump on 13 July 2024 was yet another episode in an exhausting political drama of a nation seemingly at war with itself. It should come as little surprise that this sense of internal division would reshape the history of the nation’s founding, especially the American Revolution. As Jane Kamensky has argued, the revolution has long served as ‘an origins story for the United States’, both in popular culture and academic scholarship.1 The intense…

Is China’s President Xi Jinping the new Mao? Before 2020, comparisons between the two Chinese leaders focused on Xi’s domestic authoritarianism and his demand for ideological conformity. Today another comparison comes to mind: China’s isolation. As the United States and its allies decouple from an often-vitriolic China, and as Beijing turns to Moscow again for another ‘no limits’ partnership, it seems that Xi may face a hostile world similar to the one that confronted Mao Zedong as the first leader of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) following the Chinese revolution. This comparison, however, rests on an accepted understanding of China’s relations with the outside world in the Mao era and after. The accepted periodisation of China’s foreign relations under Mao held that China experienced a deep relationship with the…

Despite the limited implementation of the comprehensive recommendations of the Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody since it concluded in 1991, the inquiry laid the foundations for Australia to interact with the truth about the colonisation, genocide and dispossession of First Nations Australians. There has since been a steady focus in various curricula to engage with the uncomfortable and darker parts of Australia’s history. The tensions that underpin truth-telling in the Australian History classroom manifested during the history wars.1 It continued more recently during the Australian Curriculum revision under the last conservative government, when the then-Minister for Education, Alan Tudge, expressed concerns that truth-telling in the Australian History curriculum would ‘paint an overly negative view of Australia’. He stated that students should instead come out of the History classroom…

Have you ever wondered how to promote deep, critical thinking while also keeping pace with a busy curriculum? My class had two sessions to revise Unit 3, Area of Study 1: Causes of the Russian Revolution. We had a SAC coming up and a strict course outline to try to stick to. It was my first year teaching 3/4 History and I was certainly feeling the pressure. I asked students to complete a survey on the key knowledge to see if there was any class consensus on what content students found confusing and what they felt most comfortable with. There wasn’t. Some students felt we needed to go back over the ideological underpinnings of the revolution, while the budding socialists in the room felt quite comfortable harping on about Marxism…