Legacies of genocidal phases have scarred the Aboriginal psyches.
AAP/Neda Vanovac
Very little is known about suicide and suicide attempts during modern genocides – but we do know there is an aftermath of suicide among victims.
Gold Rush garbage.
S.Hayes. Artefact is part of Heritage Victoria's collection.
What we buy has defined who we are since the Gold Rush. In the 1850s and 1860s, people communicated their social status by buying stuff - dinner sets, junk jewellery - and throwing their old things away.
The helmet of a heavily armed ‘secutor’, first century AD.
Rógvi N. Johansen, Department of photo and medie Moesgaard
Roman gladiators were unique and complex characters, and certainly not the sporting heroes they’re depicted as in culture today.
Michael Jackson sings during the opening performance of a 13-city U.S. tour in 1988.
AP Photo/Cliff Schiappa
The story of African-American music is a story of eclipsing expectations and subverting norms.
Gregg Henry portrays President Donald Trump in the role of Caesar in the Public Theater’s Free Shakespeare in the Park production of ‘Julius Caesar,’ in New York City.
Joan Marcus/The Public Theater via AP
Some have denounced the New York Public Theater for encouraging violence against President Trump. But the play does just the opposite, warning of the pitfalls of political assassination.
French President Macron attends a ceremony marking the 77th anniversary of de Gaulle’s resistance call of June 18, 1940.
Bertrand Guay/Reuters
Despite a low voter turnout, the new French president has a solid majority in parliament. He will need it to push his reforms at home and in Europe.
A stroll through Sydney’s Marks Park and the nearby tourist attraction Sculptures by the Sea is a different experience if one knows the area’s brutal history.
Leah-Anne Thompson from www.shutterstock.com
Wandering the city by foot helps us look beneath ordinary conceptions of the face value of a place to the meanings built up and lost over time.
‘Man at the crossroads’
Diego Rivera/Wikimedia
A new study of how frequently certain words were used between 1800 and 2000 shows that political power as a guiding principle is more important than money and religious belief.
Filling in the gaps.
Jonathan Brady/PA Archive/PA Images
The Booker Prize-winning novelist’s Reith lectures explore the complex relationship between historical fact and fiction.
Who is portrayed as Australian? ‘Opening of the first parliament’ Tom Roberts c.1903.
Wikipedia
Despite improvements to their content over time, secondary school history textbooks still imply that ‘real’ Australians are white.
Hogarth’s The Polling, from the Humours of an Election series.
Wikipedia
We take it for granted, but it wasn’t always so easy to take part in the democratic functioning of the country.
President Obama and the cast and crew of ‘Hamilton’ in NYC, 2015.
iip-photo-archive/flickr
Over the past 300 years, Western educated elites have debated, founded and expanded the right to vote.
At a demonstration, Faith Bandler (right) and her daughter Lilon (2R) appeal to national unity as grounds for constitutional amendment.
Aboriginal Studies Press
The 1967 referendum was the culmination of a long struggle for both Aboriginal rights and respect, for social esteem as well as equality before the law.
Indigenous children depicted in an etching playing the game of marngrook, which some have claimed inspired the game of Australian rules.
Wikimedia Commons
The revival of the idea of Indigenous influence on the origins of Australian rules football diverts attention from another, much more uncomfortable story about Indigenous relationships to football.
Satirical Bank Note (1820), highlighting how easy it was to be hanged for spending fake money, despite how prevalent it was.
George Cruikshank and William Hone
The 19th century Irish crimewave that wasn’t: how a change of policing brought the English counterfeiters to book.
Kunstmuseum St Gallen/Wikimedia Commons
If the thought of undergoing surgery fills you with dread, spare a thought for your forebears.
Health workers during the 2014-2016 Ebola outbreak in West Africa. The Chinese view of and response to epidemics differs markedly from that developed in the West.
Reuters
Not every country prepares for global health threats in the same way.
Supporters of presidential candidate Moon Jae-in.
REUTERS/Kim Kyung-Hoon
North and South Korea explained in four questions and answers.
An artist’s depiction of the ‘shibboleth incident.’
Detail from art by H. de Blois, from The Bible and Its Story Taught by One Thousand Picture Lessons, vol. 3, edited by Charles F. Horne and Julius A. Bewer, 1908
Going as far back as the Bible, and as widely known as the phrase ‘Open, Sesame,’ passwords are a textual link to our past. But they may not be around much longer.
Afrocentric history emerged strongly during the post-colonial 1960s.
Shutterstock
A global approach to African history complements the radical post-colonial histories, while also asserting the role of the continent in the world’s global pasts and present.