It is a matter of public record in Australia that my grandfather was a communist spy. That he wasn’t really one doesn’t always matter. Manning Clark, famous Australian historian and my father’s father…
“It will be a whole new era for Richard III,” Lynda Pidgeon, spokeswoman for the Richard III Society, said of the discovery that the skeleton found under a car-park in Leicester is almost certainly that…
Any major sporting triumph without euphoric emotion or a serious opening of the floodgates would seem strange. Commentators tell us that tears show “passion”. Fans seem to demand them. It wasn’t always…
Why is the University of Sydney powerless to stop bullying behaviour in what the public sees as “its colleges”? This has been a constant refrain in recent weeks as the controversy surrounding the behaviour…
MEDICAL HISTORIES - The second instalment in our short series examines how the spermatorrhoea epidemic changed the scope of medicine. Every period arguably invents its own illnesses, medical disorders…
“What are your legs? Springs. Steel springs”. Archy’s nervous mutterings before he sprints into gunfire are familiar in Australian history classes. So are the tale of Simpson and Duffy and their “bravest…
Ten years ago this month, John Howard’s Minister for Veteran Affairs, Danna Vale, launched a searchable internet database known as the World War 2 Nominal Roll. It was intended to be a virtual war memorial…
All human societies construct and teach creation myths or origin stories. These are large, extraordinarily powerful, but often ramshackle narratives that try and tell the story of how everything came to…
The Holy Roman Empire, 1704: Agnes Catherina Schickin slits the throat of a seven-year-old boy. 1746: Johanna Martauschin smashes the skull of a small child. 1753: Sophia Charlotte Krügerin cuts the throat…
FUTURE OF HIGHER EDUCATION: We continue our series on the rise of online and blended learning and how free online courses are set to transform the higher education sector. Today Ruth Morgan looks at the…
There is a great deal of derogatory, evidence-free and ill-informed opinion about how history is taught in Australian schools. But these tired arguments are so often repeated that we can actually put them…
A combination of 33-year satellite records, measurements made over the past century, and long-term proxy analysis suggests Arctic sea ice may be at its lowest level for more than 1,000 years. According…
As humans, we create life. And we’re all familiar with the idea of artificial intelligence. But what about artificial life? What is it, and why should we care? Artificial Life is a recently labelled but…
The looting of the Baghdad Museum in 2003 during the invasion of Iraq is an example the consequences of war on national heritage. Almost a decade on, the civil war in Syria has seen history repeating itself…
Much hyperbole has been generated by the recent revelations concerning Sir Anthony Mason’s involvement in the 1975 dismissal, but for the most part it shows ignorance of the past. Earlier this week, The…
What happens when you teach students how to lie? Answer: they become better historians. More than a decade ago, back in the days of Web 0.5, a student of mine submitted a generally well-written essay on…
They say history always repeats itself - empires rise and fall, economies boom and bust - but is there a way to map and predict the dynamical processes of history? The new and highly controversial discipline…
Now, as at the time of the Vietnam war, the global primacy of the United States is increasingly being questioned. Among the reasons are its role in the Global Financial Crisis (GFC), the continued and…
Today marks the 50th anniversary of Australian forces arriving in Vietnam – the beginning of a war that had a huge impact on social and political life here in Australia and abroad. The Conversation will…
On the ABC’s Q&A program on Monday night, Shadow Minister for Education Christopher Pyne was asked what the Liberal Party would do about the national (history) curriculum if they came to power. Pyne’s…