“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…
Are displays of emotion from sportspeople about convincing us that it’s not just about the money?
fox2mike/flickr
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…
NSW premier Barry O'Farrell needs to reform the law to give Sydney University more responsibility for its colleges.
AAP Image/Alan Porritt
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…
Spermatorrhoea was said to be ‘the most dire, excruciating and deadly maladies to which the human frame is subject.’
Guillaume Duchenne
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…
There are some powerful stories in the Anzac tradition but many more that are unknown to students.
Australian War Memorial
“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…
Australia is not fulfilling its obligations to its veterans.
Flickr/Another Seb
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…
Why is it that we no longer teach the big story of how everything came to be?
Universe image from www.shutterstock.com
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…
1783: Maria Anna Mayrin murders a three-year-old girl, turns herself in and is sentenced to death.
Stadt- und Staatsbibliothek Augsburg, Graphic, Verbrecher etc.
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…
Australian humanities subjects need to get on board with MOOCs and develop Australian voices in online learning.
World image from www.shutterstock.com
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…
Former Prime Minister John Howard is misinformed about the Australian history curriculum.
AAP Image/Julian Smith
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…
Will we ultimately see 2012 as triumphant, or as just one step in an emerging global tragedy?
Jenny Varley
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…
Statuettes and a reproduction of the automatic theatre of Hero of Alexandria.
Alan Dorin.
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 Crusader fortress of Krak De Chevalier has been damaged by shelling after rebels used it as a defensive position.
AAP image
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…
The final pieces of the historical puzzle around the 1975 Whitlam dismissal are not as sensational as they first seem.
Image courtesy of National Archives of Australia. NAA: A6180, 13/11/75/33
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…
By deliberately making false historical sources, students can learn to think more critically.
Historical hoax image www.shutterstock.com
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…
Revolution and war: is it all just a little bit of history repeating?
blprnt_van
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…
President Nixon’s meeting with China’s Communist Party Leader Mao Tse Tung in 1972 began closer ties between the two countries.
Wikimedia/Office of Presidential Libraries
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…
Vietnam-US relations, as represented here by US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Vietnam’s Foreign Minister Pham Binh Minh, have come a long way.
EPA/KHAM/POOL
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…
Opposition education spokesman Christopher Pyne’s recent comments show his misunderstanding of curriculum.
AAP Image/Alan Porritt
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…
If the same parts of Australian history are taught over and over again, we shouldn’t be surprised that students lose interest.
Flickr/murphyeppoon
Buried away in the correspondence columns of last week’s Sunday Age, a former history teacher’s letter “Where’s our history?” started an intense and confused debate about a “threat” by the national curriculum…