Historians

Boyd on the reason behind changing approaches to history?

‘methods, questions, sources and optics have altered’

‘democratisation of history’

anyone can study history and add to historical debates. i.e, NINA (No Irish Need Apply

Kremmler’s view on the democratisation of history?

‘history has become an anything goes occupation’

Jenkins on the meaning of history,

“different things to different groups”

Ranke’s 'wie es eigentlich gewesen’ approach?

history should be written ‘as it happened’ → colourless history without bias

Aims of academic history?

Create new knowledge about the past → innovate and push discipline further

construct historical interpretations or arguments about the past (new archival sources, theories, sources, etc)

What does academic history involve?

Scholarly conversation with historians, both past and present; publishing in specialised, peer reviewed outlets, academic journals

Public historians aim to

interpret the past for broader public understanding, emphasizing primary sources and material structure → historical research

Hilda Kean on public history?

‘public history [is] a practice which has the capacity for involving people as well as nations and communities in the creation of their own histories’

audience of public history?

general public, public, government, children, etc

De Groot on popular history?

‘Forms and practices which history is transmitted in culture’ → driven by audience interest

What is the primary purpose of popular history?

To entertain, tell compelling narratives about the past. To engage with storytelling, inspire [assion, anger, nationalism, sentimentality.

Usually emphasises narrative, personality and vivid detail over scholarly analysis

Main difference between public, popular and academic history?

they play very different roles → different historical meaning and understanding

Example for digitization of history and falsification of history?

JFK’s lost speech → historical falsification? innovative use of source material?

Key features of marxist history:

• economic structures are determining forces, conflicting between different social classes (workers/bourgeoise)

  • economic conditions affect the way they live and affect the way they think about the world

Key features of feminist history?

• recover the perspectives of women → emphasis on oral history; reading against the grain

• Don’t explain how history develops, but prompts and enthusiasms made history broader and more inclusive

• democratisation of history → anyone can add to history

Key aspects of post-modernist history?

• Those who assert multiple truths exist, tend to emphasise the subjective nature of the discipline

Key opposition to post modernism?

Windschuttle

Peter Geyl context:

POW for four years under Nazi Germany, saw the fabrication and manipulation of history:

“collective memory of the public largely the product of the historian’s teaching”

Peter Geyl and similarity to Ranke’s ‘every epoch?’

• “No doubt the historian can be so wrapped up in his own day that he does not recognise it as such.. when dealing with historical myths, traditions, or misconceptions in the past, the historian has to accept them as manifestations to the generation to which they belong”

Areas of Herodotus debate:

• Didactic purpose?

• Below or above? He is above

• Oral history?

Key features of classical historians (i.e Herodotus, Thucydides, Bede)

Range of people, range of purposes, similar forms, narrative → chronological

History connected to a range of things: myth, religion, politics

Areas of debate for Bede:

Didactic purpose?

Key features of modern historians (i.e Von Ranke?)

• Professionalism

  • Debate: no clear way to ‘do’ history → analysis, testing sources

Von Ranke areas of debate?

• Objectivity: academic vs public? Academic: telling the truth, historical protocol, source analysis, rigorous research, qualifications?

• Empiricism vs Relativism → truth found through extensive research

• History from above vs below → Ranke= above

Windschuttle area of debate:

• Purpose of history? Political?

  • National identity → history influences identity → revisionism becomes politically tense → History wars

  • Relies of unofficial white colonial records, “if evidence cannot be found in the official colonial records, then it could not have happened” → written vs oral

Reynolds (Revisionist) areas of debate:

• Voice to historical silence of Aboriginals in Australian history

  • debate → purpose of history: political?

    • debate → history from above vs below → danger is that historians will exaggerate events to create a dichotomy between good and evil (exaggerating death counts)

Key features of post modernism:

• criticism and reaction to modernism

• history from different people, professionals, journalists, filmmakers, documentary makers, ‘democratised’ history, the more voices, the better

Key features of post truth and example:

Poltiical → history can be misused to promote a political agenda.

eg. Trump’s view on the US ‘winning 2 world wars and bringing communism to its knees’

Areas of debate for historians and Biographers, according to McDonough:

“Biographers are the best rewarded, and least respected member of the historical profession”

• Biographers aren’t historians because they consider individuals separate from context

What is the debate on historical statues to record history? To keep them?

• American academics, individuals (eg journalists, lawyers, rabbis) believe that statues of individuals should be kept up.

• Those commemorated/immortalised in statues have faults, but so does everyone → propose that we should have labels stating who and what

• Bill Bigellow, “We don’t have to repeat the past, we do have to learn from it” → tearing statues down won’t do anything other than bury history

• Daniel Rieff, “monuments encourage viewers to read about and understand our past”

Historical debate on monuments to record history? To tear them down?

Confederate statues, American memory → English journalist and columnist for New York Times Roger Cohen says that statues should be taken down and placed in impartial museums for more ‘educational/informative’ purposes, rather than glorification

• Statues highlight America’s inability to confront its past and ignorance of black heritage/slavery

• While one shouldn’t remove them due to sensitivity, they should exist only to negate the subjugation of AA

Cohen, “Statues.. extend for many decades the subjugation of African Americans”.

“They should be gathered in museums where their lesson can be taught and debated”

Trump on Misuse/Politicisation of History: 1776 Commission?

September 20 committee → commissioned by Trump to increase ‘patriotic education’ via ‘non partisan’ review and revision of Amercian historical scholarship regarding slavery primarily. It was a response to the NYT Pullitzer Prize winning 1819 project which examined the origins and legacy of insitutional racism within US history (released on 92nd anniversary of MLK)

PURPOSE:

• End ‘radicalised view of American history’ which has ‘vilified the US founders and its founding’

• Non-partisan view to create ‘patriotic educational curricula and provide accurate representation of history’.

CONSTRUCTION:

• 18 members → conservative activists to politicians and intellectuals → no professionals. Did not include citations, footnotes, acknowledge main errors.

AHA, “Filled with errors, and partisan politics” → identifying factual inaccuracies and substantial lack of legitimate historical scholarship

QUOTES:

Grossman, “a hack job that was not a work of politics, but cynical politics”

Alexis Cole, “Riddled with errors, distortion and outright lies”

Sean Wilentz, “basically a political document that reduces history to hero worship”

Margo Jefferson, “it’s propaganda masquerading as a serious document with intellectual content”

History as propaganda?

Bede → everything through the prism of trying to spread the ‘true faith’

→ reliant on written sources: an important weapon for Christian writers to oppose paganism → instruction of posteriority

Historical debate on the professionalisation of history?

The level of objectivity that can be attained → post-modernism vs historians rehabilitating Ranke

The history wars outline:

Geoffrey Blainey → a balance sheet of what has been good and bad for the history of Australia:

• three cheers for economic

• no cheers for environment

• cheer for democracy

• treatment of indigenous, ‘blot’ → tragic but inevitable

The three cheers view: all histories are products of historians, rarely value-neutral → a progressive account meant to incite nationalist feeling → nation building (polticisation of history)

Canberra’s National Museum and politicisation for history:

• Opened with different sections → first Australians, nations.

• Controversial because it took a curotiral approach with Winschuttle calling it ‘trivialised white history’ and didn’t tell the story of national progress

• Too political and not political enough “sneers at the white history of Australia”

Marxism and structural contingency debate?

• Marxism is viewed as teleological because it views human history as moving towards a predetermined end and establishment of classless society

• Marx’s claim to find a determined end is structuralist: it looks beyond ideas of significant historical individuals and focuses on underlying and structural forces

‘History from below’ → Windschuttle discounts oral testimony, stating it is unreliable and subjective → used to politicise

Digitisation of History and democratisation → case study NINA

‘No Irish Need Apply’ → American high school student Fried challenged interpretation of history professor about the prevalence of ‘No Irish Need Apply’

• In 2002, professor Jensen published an article stating there was no evidence → urban myth

• Year 8 Student Fried published an article that disagreed → she found evidence on google through a digitised newspaper

• This challenges who can publish history, amateur and debate (democratisation)

Digitisation of history → overabundance of sources → case study → Twitter

“Historians are facing a fundamental paradigm shift from a culture of scarcity to a culture of abundance” -Roy Rosenzweigh

i.e Barrack O’Bama said his tweets needed to be screened

Trump send the Pentagon into panic thinking he would use nuclear weapons if ‘rocket man’ did not back down. He would have no choice but ‘to destroy North Korea’

Emma Shortis, ‘adult daycare centre’ → posits that twitter just confirms biases and future historical investigations will have to shift

Case study: Digitisation of history → Wikipedia:

• A form of postmodernism in action, knowledge does not have to come from experts, but collective wisdom

• “Democratisation of history associated with evolving discipline in the 20th Century” -Marne Hughes Warrington

• Tim Hitchcock, '“dynamic response”

Post Structuralist View of Michel Foucault:

• Truth cannot be objective and to be objective is to be outside one’s power

• Acceptable ideas change and develop in the course of time, manifested as paradigm shifts of intellectualism

• Regime of truths → knowledge and truth are created by the power structures of society: upheld by regimes like schools.

“The theme thqat underlines all Foucault’s work is the relationship between power and knowledge, and how the former is used to control the latter” (Stokes)

History should be a diverse, multiple narrative rather than a single unified truth, “historical descriptions are necessarily ordered by the present state of knowledge, they increase with every transformation and never cease, in turn, to break with themselves” (Foucault)

“Marxism exists in nineteenth century like a fish in water; that is, unable to breathe anywhere else”

Structuralism (Marx) vs Post Structuralism (Faucult)

Structuralism focuses on examination of relations between things at every level of culture and knowledge, and rejects notions of unchanging human nature being at the centre of all origin and action.

Post-structuralism argues that meaning is not fixed or stable (depends on context, interpretation, perspective), context is key in understanding words, texts, cultural practices, and that there are no single correct ways for interpretation

Post modern historian Charlotte Lydia Riley:

• No objective history → subjective narratives based on facts and we should rewrite the past to gain more refined history so humanity can make better sense of the past

• “History cannot exist without being rewritten”

• Unknit the stories that construct..the past..pick holes in it.. pull it apart and write it all again from a different perspective”

• History is weaponised as a political tool for corrupt institutions to achieve their ideological ambitions

• “New sources help historians write better because they help change the focus of those narratives”

• “Story of dwad white men.. kings..queens”

Feminist historian, history from below

Postmodern historyian: Jenkins

Historians are “ideologically positioned workers”

Subjected to “ideological modes of conservatism, liberalism”

“Histories are fabricated without ‘rea’ foundations”

“Ask - in whose interests?'“

A work of history is as much about the historians’s own world view and ideological positions as it is about past events “The content is as much invented as found”

Believes that each generation writes their own history. If you take a source out of context, it has no meaning

Historians on film as a source of information:

“A good way to balance accuracy and creativity is to focus on the truth of the forest rather than the trees” Williams

“As technology takes over, and books fade further and further into a distant era, movies are bestowed with an even greater power to influence and inspire” Teichholz

“Filmmakers can often devote far more resources to research than scholars..add to our collective, historical understanding rather than popularising or debasing it” -Zelikow

Area of debate for digitisation of history: YOUTUBE - Simple history

• Animation is a powerful way to bring history alive in people’s imaginations

• Almost 5 million subscribers

• Covers history from the Aztecs to 21st century conflicts

• “The charming medium of animation” (Turner)

• “Reach a wider audience of history enthusiasts around the globe”

• Largely corporatised, recently getting a 7 figure investment

Digitisation of history: Assassin’s Creed Odyssey

• Peloponnesian War and had in house historians and consulted with external historians for the project →10 million sales

• “Despite historical inaccuracies, the game provides visual and virtual authenticity” (Politopoulos)

• “This accuracy, in essence, provides a window into the past. A window one can enter and explore in an almost physical way - Learning too!” (Andrews)

• “Accessibility of the Ancient world through popular video game might contribute to a new generation of people interested in studying.. novel avenue of teaching” (Andrews)

• “Create an immersion in the past to generate an experience unlike what historical discourse can offer” (Ruatta)

• “Allows for a greater popularisation and diffusion of historical knowledge and offers new and inventive modes of historical representation that can contribute to scientific historiography” (Ruatta)

The Black Armband view of history?

“Might as well represent the swing of the pendulum that had been too favourable, too self congratulatory, to an opposite extreme that is even more unreal and decidedly jaundiced”

Quotes from Reynolds for the Windschuttle-Reynold debate:

Reynolds favours Aboriginal interpretation of history and influenced by personal convictions dealing with disadvantaged and displaced Indigenous people in North Queensland,

“I met Aborigines and Torres Strait Islanders. I saw their poverty and the way they were treated”

Previously a ‘mental block’ which prevented Australians coming to terms with the past -Reynolds

“Overdoing the violence theme” -Atwood

Windschuttle quotes from debate,

“If evidence cannot be found in the official colonial records, then it could not have happened”

“Archive documents have a reality and objectivity of their own”

“Historians are not free to interpret evidence according to their theories or prejudices.. evidence will restrict the purpose of which it can be used”

Says that Reynolds, “mythologies designed to create an edifice of black victimhood and white guilt”

“Aboriginal oral history when corroborated by original documents is completely unreliable” -Windschuttle

Forms of historicaal communication:

• Any academic historian

• Statues

• Simple History

• Assassin’s Creed

Why have approaches to histories changed over time?

• Availability of historical evidence

• Changing perspectives about approaches to construction of history

• Changing technology

• Changing audeinces (ie everyone, academic, religious, public, younger)

Herodotus context:

• Born in 484 BC, affluent upper class. History of Ionian writers, believed in hard and soft cultures.

Aim of herodotus,

commemorative, to remember those who fought and died for greece,

“These researches are here set down to preserve the memory of the past by putting on record the astonishing achievements of both our own and other heroes”

Influenced by hubris, “I will proceed with my story, telling the story as I go along of small cities no less than of great. For most of those which were great once are small today, and those which used to be great in my own time.”

Methodology of Herodotus?

Aimed to provide non-biased story, “this is the most credible of stories told, but I must relate the less credible tale also”

Invented new genre → ‘History’ - moved away from the style of Homer → “History aims at truth but poetry aims at pleasure”

Construction of Herodotus history?

Oral evidence, did not have access to written archives or works of past generations Used speeches:

‘In oratio Recta’ → his own reconstruction

‘In oratio Oblique’ → the gist of words

Perspective of Herodotus history?

‘History from above’ → sources in similar positions, upper or middle class men of power; also personal history → cause and effect style, saw an analysis of personal relationships. Also Athenocentric

Other historians on Herodotus?

Oral sources meant less credibility “Acquired a reputation of bias and unreliability” -Hughes Warrington

Thucydides’, “pleasing the ear rather than telling the truth”

‘Father of history’ or ‘Father of lies’? Accused of falsehood, errors and according to Hartog, “not really a historian”

Discrepancies in his stories that seem to combine mythology → “here in this desert, there live amid the great ants in somewhat less than dogs, but bigger than foxes, sand which they throw up is full of gold”

However, Michael Peissel cites discovery of big marmots, explorers who found indigenous people that collect gold dust from marmots work, “Vindicates Herodotus”

• At the time, ‘history’ didn’t mean research into the past, rather any intellectual inquiry → uses ‘Histories’ to infer, “The establishment of a rational inquiry into the past”

• Oversimplification to claim Herodotus is wrong and naive.. explanation as how the world looked in Ancient times.

Thucydides Context

• Lived in 460-400BCE, in or near Athens,, the son of aristocratic Athenian → owned estate in Thrace with goldmines, giving family considerable and lasting influence

Thucydides Methodology

• Used unnamed oral sources and written sources and ‘evidence’ from oracles to fill gaps

• Used archaelogical evidence to support argument building Athens’ walls were rushed. Used political and military sources

• First historian to not recognise divine intervention in human affairs

• Fierce concentration on a single topic, first of his kind to maintain a ‘voice’.

• Utilised history by Synecdhoche to explore that experiences at Corcyra were representative of the whole war

• Influenced by Sophist philosophy → argument, counter argument, opinion and counter opinion.

Thucydides purpose?

Moved by suffering inherent in war, concerned about excesses to which human nature is apt to resort to violence, “war is a violent teacher”.

Aimed not for ‘momentary pleasure’ but for ‘whose intended meaning will be challenged by the truth of the facts’

Flaws in Thucydides methodology?

Made assumptions, “Meanwhile, Nicias, appalled by the position of affairs… and thinking as men are apt to think in great crises when all has..”

• As a general himself, Thucydided could estimate Nicias psychological state, and emphathise, but if he’s telling the truth beyond the narrative events, he is falsifying history.

• It reveals Thucydides is imposing a pattern on events (moralising) to teach his audiences something

Does his best to remain objective, but cannot always hide personal judgements → turns the account of the plague at Athens in 429 into a shocking story of moral corruption and hence if one is writing ‘objective’ history, it shouldn’t be moralising!

Thucydies sources?

• Utilised evidence from eyewitnesses, “whose reports I have checked with as much thoroughness as possible”, and acknowledged some where “speaking out of partiality for one side or the other or else from imperfect memories”

• Attempted to keep as close as possible to overall sense of what was actually said → ‘invented speeches’ but says where.

Other historians on Thucydides:

“The glory that was Greece, was it real or has Thucydides contributed to an ideal construction?” John Burrow

Arnaldo Mongliano notes how Thucydides made assumptions, “Thucydides was very interested in matters such as human responses in times of danger, his technique was to enter the mind of his character and discuss feelings and behaviour”

JB Bury considers his works as objective, “severe in its detatchment, written from a purely intellectual point of view, unencumbered with platitudes, cold and critical”

RW Connor, “an artist who responds to, selects and skillfully arranges his material, and develops its symbolic and emotional potential”.

Bede Context:

From the dark ages - only monks, priests, scribes could read and write

Given to the Church to be raised → prolific writer best known for ‘Ecclesiastical history of the English people’, but also wrote many other books. He was interested in hagiography and his primary audience was monks and kings. Work was shaped to be engaging and provoke thought rather than account of historical events

Bede’s purpose:

• ‘Instruct posterity’ which meant he wrote to spread the teaching of the gospel in the hopes people will convert to catholicism

• “Industriously take care to become acquainted with the actions and sayings of former men of renown… for if history relates good things of good men, the attentive hearer is excited to imitate that which is good; shunning that of which is hurtful or perverse, more earnestly excited to perform good deeds”

• “I beseech all men who shall hear or read this history of our nation.. they will offer frequent supplications to the Throne of Grace”

Bede’s methodology:

• Established AD and BC system, meticulously named sources and acknowledged fallacies in his writings, “I humbly entreat the reader, that.. he will not impute me, who as the true rule of history requires, have laboured sincerely to commit to writing such things as I could gather from common report, for the instruction of posterity

• Used history to highlight miracles, and did not give appropriate due to pagan kings = bias

  • Specifically names his sources and what type of information he gained - willing to admit fallibility and acknowledged translation errors, utilising second and third account. Didn’t document lower classes

Other historians on Bede?

• “In these secular times, it may be difficult for the reader to understand the motivation behind Bede’s work” -M Hughes Warrington

• “[Bede] Began his history by generating a list of events from his several easter annals and chronological works.. and entries from regnal and biships lists, and Irish records..then expanded with undated material from saints’ lives, legends, and accounts of battles he thought would edify those who heard or read the book” -Hughes Warrington

• “Risky to call him a historian at all” -EH Carr

• “Meticulously names his sources, distinguished between indirect accounts of events and reports of witnesses and noted when he obtained a story by hearsay”

Von Ranke Biographical information:

• Father of objective history, scientific history, empiricism

• Born in 1975 in a small German town

• Rejected Enlightenment view that God could not be used to explain events in human history

• Argued against teleological view of history “each age is next to God” and must be studied in its own epoch, not that one is superior to the next

• Distaste for moralising, demanding the historian put aside his or her values to avoid judging the past, only then can the past be properly reconstructed.

Methodology of Von Ranke?

• Objective approach → historian would naturally uncover the workings of God in human history

• “History has assigned to it the office of judging the past and instructing the account for the benefit of future ages. To show high offices the present work does not presume; it seeks only to show what actually happened”

• Documents the only way to discuss history, only primary sources could be used to document history → second unreliable.

• Used philology; the study of primary sources through archival research to establish authenticity → admired by British and Americans for telling history “as it was” and making historians able to “extinguish themselves”

von Ranke’s type of history:

• Issues that interested him: political history, monarchism, patriotism and religious meaning

Quotes from von Ranke

• “I see the time approaching where we shall base modern history on the narratives of eyewitnesses, on general and original documents”

• “My UNDERSTANDING OF LEADING IDEAS IS SIMPLY THAT THEY ARE DOMINANT TENDENCIES IN EACH CENTURY. THESE TENDENCIES CAN ONLY BE DESCRIBED, THEY CANNOT BE SUMMED UP TO A CONCEPT”.

Other historians on Von Ranke?

“Rankean became shorthand for outdated, naive, dry-as-dust histories”

EH Carr, "the intention to represent the past objectively was a preposterous fallacy”

• “Facts, are like fish swimming about in a vast and sometimes inaccessible ocean; what the historian catches will depend, partly on change, but mainly on what part of the ocean he chooses to use - these two factors being, of course, determined by the kind of fish he wants to catch. By and large, the historian will get the kind of facts he wants”.

Marxist/social history beliefs?

• Believed the great shaping force was “drama of industrialization and dominance of capitalism”

• Communist manifesto → struggles between classes and shaped by the main mode of economic production

• Marx believed the social class struggle between the proletariat and bourgeoise was the driving force behind history → what would lead to overthrow of bourgeoise by proletariat

• Industrial revolution suited the time and creation of Marxism, seen as ‘teleological’ because it moves towards a predetermined end (classless society)

Marxism in the structural contingency debate?

• Climed to have found deterministic pattern → looks beyond ideas of significant historical individuals and focuses on underlying structural and economic forces

• Marx viewed these forces ie religion as a way to deny society of power = religion “opium of the masses”. Inverted traditional understanding of relationship between ideas and existence from which people’s ideas and beliefs determine their social existence

Marxist history purpose?

‘History from below’ → promoting revolutionary transformation of society leading beyond communism, looking beyond official records and looking at the working class.

Methodology of marxist historians?

• Since the proletariat has been largely illiterate, Marxists find alternatives to written sources such as oral traditions through the perspective of marginalised or oppressed individuals.

Link to oral testimony and Windschuttle debate!

Utilises the diaclectic = forms of Das Kapital → education and philosophising.

Historical materialism: the material conditions shape humanity’s history, including the way it’s written

“THE MODE OF PRODUCTION DETERMINES THE GENERAL CHARACTER OF THE SOCIAL, POLITICAL AND SPIRITUAL PROCESSES OF LIFE”

“THE HISTORY OF SOCIETY IS THE HISTORY OF CLASS STRUGGLES, FREEMAN AND SLAVE, PATRICIAN AND PLEBIAN”

“Money plans the largest part in determining the course of history” -marx

Keith Windschuttle Area of Debate

• wrote a series of essays for Quadrant about the ‘myth of frontier conflict’ in Australian history and suggested historians were willfully fabricating history

– this is something that Mark Latham from One Nation has controversially restated today regarding how students are taught history

Regarding the Quadrant essays: Evans and Thorpe point out that if there is more evidence for white deaths than black ( this is not surprising better records were likely to have been kept )

Links to Dr Lander’s presentation about history and memory, if Indigenous Australians were illiterate, how could they possibly record these atrocities in the same manner as the colonisers

Windschuttle produced ‘The Fabrication of Aboriginal History’ ( 2002 ) → wanted to scrutinise historians and replace their account with a different one

– argued there was an orthodoxy where historians covered up the mistakes in each other’s work

prefers independent eyewitness accounts as testimony, he also offers an arguably apologist history → “only 118 Aboriginal Tasmanians killed between 1803-1834”

Windschuttle and [ lack of ] evidence

• Bain Attwood noted that Windschuttle reduces settler violence by assuming that the number of recorded Aboriginal deaths represents the number who were actually killed

• Attwood also argued that Windschuttle ignored euphemisms used by colonists, assuming they recorded all deaths

– he insists on written evidence and discounts any oral testimony, essentially discounting any Indigenous accounts and presenting a one-sided perspective of the frontier wars

‘History Wars’ Case study

Wind-Shuttle: 21^st century (Revisionist)

-       Significant work: The Killing of History

-       Criticises Reynolds & the ‘Black arm band view of history’ for using myth to criticise the ‘traditional’ view of history of imperialism & exploitation (sympathises w/ Aboriginals)

-       Propose a counter-history -> Expose the inferiority of the indigenous in communication which resulted in conflict

-       What is the purpose of history? -> Political. History is used to form a national identity

-       Because history greatly influences identity, any form of revisionism of the past becomes politically tense (History Wars)

-       Relies heavily on official white colonial records, declared Aboriginal sources unreliable: “If evidence cannot be found in the official colonial records, then it could not have happened”

-       Rejects Aboriginal sources since he believes they’re unreliable

-       Wind-Shuttle challenges Reynold’s sources and methodologies, and alleging a conspiracy to propagate what he calls “massacre myths”.

Reynolds: 21^st century (Revisionist)

-       Significant work: The Other Side of the Frontier: Aboriginal Resistance To The European Invasion Of Australia

-       Question the ‘traditional’ view of Australian history

-       Supports the ‘Black armband view of history’ (bias for empathising with Aboriginal perspective?). Be a voice for the historical silence of Aboriginals in Australian history

-       DEBATE: History from below vs above -> below. The danger in emphasising social history is that some historians will exaggerate events to create a dichotomy between good & evil (E.g. exaggerating death statistics of Aboriginals)

-       “History itself is inescapably political”