Role Of Historian Research Articles

Researching the History of Education

Researching the History of Education

The Computer as a Teaching Aid: A Report on Two Class Projects

ALTHOUGH quantification, especially where it involves the use of a computer, has become a recognized, if often controversial, tool for historical research,' little attention has been given to the possibility of using it as a teaching vehicle. Yet statistics and computers can offer exciting alternatives to the traditional term papers on much-hackneyed subjects which seldom stimulate the intellects of either the students who write them or the teacher who reads them. Further, class projects using quantification are applicable to classes of virtually any size or level of sophistication (certainly to any college history class). Much more important, in such projects every student plays the role of historian. Depending upon the design of the project, students may define the focus of the research, evaluate the evidence, and, as a class, conduct an investigation the scope of which would have been unthinkable only a few years ago. No special expertise is required of the student, and actually little on the part of the instructor. Based

The Australian Colonists

This book is conceived of as the first in a series of four volumes on the social history of Australia. Although this series will range from the beginning of British settlement in 1788 down to recent times, it will look backward and forward from 25 April 1915, the day on which soldiers from Australia landed at Anzac Cove?named after the initials of the Australian and New Zealand Army Corps?as part of a British and French force which was supposed to capture Constantinople. Although the campaign failed before the year was out, the name of Anzac was on its way to becoming sacred. Ken Inglis, who has taught history at the Universities of Melbourne and Adelaide, the Australian National Uni versity, and the University of Papua New Guinea, has a questioning, probing mind. In so far as the Australians at Anzac represented a distinctive culture, Inglis asks what were the various forces which shaped that culture. In this first volume he carries his investigation down to 1870 when the British Army pulled out of Australia. It is the historian's role to take the evidence which has survived from the past and, through a creative act of the imagination, attempt to bring the past alive again in the present. Most historians have con centrated on recreating political and military events using such sources as government decrees, legislative records, political memoirs, or news paper reports. But increasingly in the effort to understand the cultural life of a people, the spirit of a nation, its peculiar social traditions, his torians have also been delving into social records, poetry, songs, novels, paintings, engravings, caricatures, and popular festivities. In Canada some years ago Arthur Lower pioneered in writing social history using some such sources in Canadians in the Making, but his work was shorter and less richly documented than this splendid volume. Inglis examines the cultural baggage which the colonists brought with them, their clash with enemies both natural and human in a new environment, their religious celebrations and popular festivals, and the emergence of a new group of heroes. Often Inglis taps evidence from other historians, but he uses this material with consummate skill to produce new insights, and in exploring holidays he is largely opening new ground. Moreover, through out this volume, Inglis makes effective use of poetry, often ghastly as literature but useful evidence of the developing outlook of cultural leaders.

One Man's Voyage: Ideas and Films in the 1930's

I don't know that I can give anything like a complete picture of the films of the thirties and the forces running through them. I am not a scholar, but a film maker. My experiences with talk and writing on events I have lived through tell me that most reconstructions of even the recent past have a large admixture of fantasy, self-justification, and the distortions of neatness and summary. Nor do they often take into account the simple fact that this past was present, and therefore shared the complexities and the search for simple truth that is characteristic of the current present. Much as I would like to take the time and mental wrestling to come up with a full, meaningful picture of the period, I have to forego the role of historian. What can I do? I am an entity with continuity. I was a struggling film maker then. I am a struggling film maker now. (To make a film is to struggle.) I was moved then by certain key feelings and ideas: That art is fundamentally an extraction from experience, shaping the data of experience into an organic object that has a double life-a life of its own and an active interpenetration with the process of experience. That art/film relates to experience in wide and deep ways-not only in a sensory way but in feeling, in ideas, in meanings-in taking a thrust from the passions of life and sending thrusts into the channels of living, sometimes in crystallizing out prime empathies and life-purposes. That a man, an artist, does not live alone any more than a tree does: he is an integral part of the continuum of nature, the continuum of society, with its satisfactions, distortions, and cruelties, its struggles for human solutions. His life is bound with other men and women, nor can he help reaching for or blocking the solution of social problems. That film as a medium is unique in many ways: its relative newness, which offers the excitement of finding untried ways of expressing things; its capacity to make a direct route into the minds and feelings of the audience; its sense of immediacy and contemporaneity. That because of these qualities there exists the danger of what I call film chauvinism: film viewed as an art to displace all others, making poetry, painting, dancing, drama, etc., irrelevant rather than being one of many ways of stating oneself to oneself and to others, of extracting permanences from the flowing evanescence of experience. That art/film can speak truth or falsehood. These are some of the ideas that moved me then and equally move me now. So perhaps the best thing I can do here is to try to give a feeling of

Historians in Politics: Slobodan Jovanovic

Two factors determined the relationship between historians and politics in the Balkans: the role which historiography performed in modern nationalism, and the part which the fairly thin layer of intelligentsia played in the public and political life of Balkan peoples. From the eighteenth century the national (i.e. political) renaissance of Balkan societies found its ideological foundations in historical works and writings. In contrast to the Enlightenment in Western Europe, a similar movement in the Balkans was based on history, its function being to legitimize the revolutionary birth of the nineteenth-century Balkan national societies, to reveal to them their perspectives, and to justify the aggressiveness of their young nationalism. It was by way of history that links were established between the past and the present, between the historian and politics. The second factor which stimulated the historian's role in politics was the prestige which scholars enjoyed among the Balkan public. In a predominantly peasant society, where the far from numerous intelligentsia was still in the early stages of development, the word 'science' had a mystical, even magical resonance. Scientific was eo ipso genuine: the scholar was considered the apostle of truth. The first native intellectuals were absorbed into the state apparatus, which lacked trained people, and rose quickly in the political hierarchy.1 In nineteenth-century Serbia the 'Higher School' (Velika Skola) became an antechamber for politics. Among the professors who took up politics several were

The Historian as Villain: The Historian's Role in the Training of Teachers

(1972). The Historian as Villain: The Historian's Role in the Training of Teachers. The Historian: Vol. 34, No. 3, pp. 407-420.

'I want to be a TV historian when I grow up!': On Being a Rewind Historian

In 2004, I worked as a presenter on a new ABC TV program called Rewind. Produced as part of a special initiative to make programs about Australian history, Rewind used several historians as presenters and promised to tell new stories from Australia’s past. Few historians experience the production processes of television in such a detailed way: the media and the academy are arguably a little suspicious of each other. The experience of working on Rewind was an extraordinary one – both exhilarating and frustrating. In this article, I draw on this experience to explore some of the issues that one faces as a ‘television historian’. How much control were we able to exert over our role and presence in the storytelling process? How were we used in the program and marketed in its publicity? The article also explore the qualities of television history itself: what are its flaws and virtues? How is it different from written history? It examines recent history on television to consider the media context in which Rewind was made and received. Finally, the article considers the role of historians in the making of Rewind and examines audience perceptions and responses to the program.

The historian's role in futures research

The nature of history gives the historian important advantages in researching futures. He is trained to understand the threads of change that stretch back into the past, he is aware that there is a real choice for mankind, and he tends to see his audience as the public rather than experts. Three major trends can be depicted: the swelling up of war, the emergence of a new class of the educated, and the growth of the under class. But within each of these can be detected the seeds of its own negation. Assessing and projecting such threads into the future could be the historian's contribution to futures research.

The Criterion of the Religious Life

E VIDENCES of organized religious ritual go back some twenty-five thousand years into the distant past. How much farther these developed forms may be eventually traced, one may only hazard opinions. Enough has been disclosed of the life of ancient men to make clear that members of the human race, even at the lowest stages of culture, experienced religious emotions and gave form to the religious response. The history of religious cultures, therefore, presents a vast complexity of human behavior and institutional form which has come to be designated religious. The historian takes this wealth of varying forms descriptively without attempting to evaluate it. His task is primarily that of recording and understanding the phenomena of the various cultures which, in the language of these respective peoples, have been considered imperatively sacred to accepted custom and worthy of promotion. This distinctively descriptive nature of the historian's role in religion has not always been clearly recognized or accepted, even by the historian himself. The conflict among scholars, for example, as to whether distinction shall be made between magic and religion, which has assumed such prominence in the literature of the history of religions, illustrates the point. The pertinence of this distinction turns upon the question: Is the task at hand descriptive or evaluative? The study of religions began with the comparative interest and only gradually assumed a disciplined, historical method. The historian of religion does not set magic over against religion. Rather, he speaks of the elementary forms of the religious life in contrast to rites and institutions of the culture religions. The philosopher of religion assumes the further and more hazardous task of interpreting religious phenomena with a view