Natalie Zemon Davis speaking in 2010.
davis stromgren8/flickr
Davis practised microhistory – analysing an incident, life or location as a way into writing about wider society
The Great Fire of London by Josepha Jane Battlehooke (1675).
Museum of London
Writers at the time were much more concerned with the fire’s destructive power than describing how it started in any detail.
A vintage Victorian Halloween postcard.
Public Domain Pictures
Food was tied into multiple Halloween traditions that had love trouble at their core.
Courtesy of Netflix
Life on Our Planet has some important messages about the nature of evolution, and what the future may hold for us.
Sydney Opera House, Bennelong Point Sydney, 1965.
City of Sydney Archives
Fifty years ago today, after a prolonged and controversial period of construction, the Sydney Opera House was officially opened by Queen Elizabeth II.
The statue of English merchant and slave trader Edward Colston in Bristol.
Ian Luck / Shutterstock
Retaining a statue or monument takes very little work – explaining it is a mammoth and contested task.
Rocky Mountain fires leave telltale ash layers in nearby lakes like this one.
Philip Higuera
As the climate warms, devastating fires are increasingly likely. The 2020 fires pushed the Southern Rockies beyond the historical average. Is there hope for the Northern Rockies?
The Welsh National Mining Memorial was unveiled in Senghenydd in 2013.
FreespiritEnvironment/Alamy
Four hundred and forty men and boys were killed in the Senghenydd colliery disaster, with the youngest victims aged just 14 years old.
Engin Akyurt/Pexels
A new study tracks the number of history academics and history students in Australia. The results are alarming.
Cars lined up for gasoline in New Jersey in 1973 as supplies ran low and prices shot upward.
Frederic Lewis/Archive Photos/Getty Images
Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine reprised the risks of energy weaponization, but the oil landscape today and energy security itself are changing.
Drawing by an Aboriginal boy, Oscar, of a Native Police operation c.1897 near Camooweal.
National Library of Australia, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
Killing for Country does brilliantly for one group of families what a robust, locally grounded truth-telling process might do for the whole nation.
AAP Image/Esther Linder
What should our museums collect from the sea of information and imagery to represent how Australians feel about the referendum?
Decadent Young Woman After the Dance by Ramón Casas (1899).
Musee de Montserrat
With its iconic designs and its showcasing of women writers, the Yellow Book gave its name to the decade.
George De Hevesy working in his lab at Stockholm University in 1944.
Keystone Features/Hulton Archive via Getty Images
Some Nobel Prize-winning ideas originate in strange places, but still go on to revolutionize the scientific field. George de Hevesy’s research on radioactive tracers is one such example.
Chris Frost/Shutterstock
The emotional response to the loss of the Sycamore Gap is part of a long history of emblematic trees, their destruction and renewal
Leaders of African American, Latino and Native American communities protest the name of the Washington Redskins, November, 2013.
Evelyn Hockstein/For The Washington Post via Getty Images
The book makes invaluable contributions to subjects of race, identity and belonging and how they shape human interrelations.
Photograph of the first Solvay Conference in 1911 at the Hotel Metropole. Heike Kamerlingh Onnes is standing third from the right.
Benjamin Couprie/Wikimedia Commons
Superconductivity may sound like science fiction, but the first experiments to achieve it were conducted over a century ago. Heike Kamerlingh Onnes, credited with the discovery, won a Nobel Prize in 1913.
Saxon burial mound in Taplow, England.
mbarredo/Shutterstock
Skeletons found with items that don’t align with their estimated sex are usually excluded from research – but that assumes a 19th century view of gender.
Trove
Before the 1970s, there were no trans organisations or publicly advertised gender clinics. But camp cultures brought together a variety of sexually- and gender-diverse people.
Shutterstock
The answer might surprise you.