History

The forty-sixth president of the United States, like most of his predecessors, is an avid student of American history. In August 2022, Joe Biden met for the second time with a group of pre-eminent historians to discuss his presidency and the many threats facing American democracy. A month later, standing in Independence Hall in Philadelphia, he told the American people: ‘I know our history.’ Biden has, from the beginning of his campaign for the presidency, characterised his own period of American history as a ‘battle for the soul of the nation’, riffing off historian Jon Meacham’s book The Soul of America: The battle for our better angels (2018).

History was work for Stuart Macintyre (1947–2021), writing was his pleasure, and he excelled at both. Peter Beilharz and Sian Supski, scholars from outside Macintyre’s own discipline of history, underscore the breadth of his interests and networks by initiating this collection of twenty-seven essays. They wish to honour Macintyre’s work and interrogate ‘the Macintyre effect’. That effect stemmed from prodigious scholarly output, intervention in national debates, political connections, service to professional bodies and key cultural institutions, a long career of teaching and leadership at the University of Melbourne, and mentorship. 

At first sight, the title of David Horner’s new book, The War Game, is an uncharacteristically flippant reference by a serious historian to a deadly serious business. Horner has taken the term from writers such as Jonathan Swift and Horace Walpole, who saw war being treated as a game in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The carnage of the industrial-scale wars of the twentieth century, with their current reverberations in Ukraine, makes the phrase seem almost offensive, as does the frightening prospect of a full-scale war between the United States and China over Taiwan.

'This is a book about friendship and storytelling’, writes Marilla North in her prologue to this artfully arranged selection of correspondence. It begins in 1928 and covers the next twenty-seven years, chronicling the large and small events in the lives of Dymphna Cusack, Florence James, and Miles Franklin, three of Australia’s most vital, fluent, and committed women writers.

One might question the appropriateness of this book’s title. Were women’s groups in the first half of this century championing impossible causes, or were they champions of the inevitable? In other words, to what extent did the organised women’s movement, or first-wave feminists, actively bring about legislative change to improve the position of Australian women, or might these changes have occurred anyway, the inevitable consequences of improved technology enabling women to plan their working lives?

We all like to think of ourselves as civilised. Civilisation is like ethics: a concept and an underlying value system that seems impossible to oppose. Who, after all, could possibly be against civilisation? Who would want to take issue with the institutional stability, the democratic order and the standards of fairness, decency and culture we have come to see as hallmarks of a civilised life? Brett Bowden does. He does so in an ambitious and fascinating book that offers what could be called a genealogy of civilisation: an inquiry into the history, meaning and political impact of a concept.

At first sight, a genealogy of civilisation seems a rather dry and academic exercise. Bowden, a political scientist at the Australian Defence Force Academy, University of New South Wales, examines the political and cultural contexts in which the idea and the ideal of civilisation emerged. He locates the linguistic roots of civilisation in fourteenth-century French, but then focuses primarily on how the concept took on an increasingly important meaning in the French, English and German vocabulary during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Although Bowden draws only on English-language sources, he still offers a sophisticated and remarkably wide-ranging discussion of how the concept of civilisation became central to philosophy, legal discourse, scientific progress, socio-political institutions and colonial ambitions.

Long gone are the days when the discipline of classics was almost exclusively focused on the golden ages of fifth-century Greek and first-century bce Roman literature and their antecedents. During the past decades, under the leadership of the indomitable Peter Brown and others, the period of later antiquity has become a burgeoning field of research. Yet it cannot be said that the study of specifically Christian thought and literature has been fully integrated into this development. Too often it has remained the domain of departments of theology and religion and of their associated vehicles of publication. In his thought-provoking and stunningly erudite new cultural history of time, the distinguished Cambridge classicist Simon Goldhill not only diagnoses this state of affairs but also seeks to remedy it. 

Why do publishers do this? The cover of this book screams that the Cowra breakout is an ‘untold’ story, and ‘the missing piece of Australia’s World War II history’. Neither claim is remotely true, as the author himself acknowledges. Once we get past the sensationalist cover and into the text, Mat McLachlan notes that the story of the Cowra breakout has been told several times before, and well: he even salutes Harry Gordon’s Die Like the Carp!, first published in 1978, as the ‘definitive’ account. So this is hardly the missing piece of an Australian military history jigsaw. Another stretch is the suggestion in the shoutline that the breakout was a conventional military ‘battle’.

In early 2020, as the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic took hold, a special kind of viral hazard appeared upon the surface of the sea. Offshore from Sydney, Yokohama, San Francisco, and elsewhere loitered cruise liners turned floating hot spots. As they awaited permission to dock and disembark their passengers, the boats became an inadvertent exhibition of cruising-industry foibles. Behind sluggish and patchy Covid action plans, we learned, lurked other forms of misbehaviour, from grotesquely unscrupulous labour practices to systematic tax avoidance. The high seas, it seemed, really were wild.

Persons of Interest does not fit readily into any familiar genre. It crosses the borders of biography, psychology, Cold War history, and family studies. When Pamela Burton and her sister Meredith Edwards decided to write a book about their parents, they realised that different readerships would be attracted to different parts. Who would be interested in a book about the marriage, and the post-divorce lives, of a man who had been a central figure in public controversies many decades ago and a sensitive, introspective woman who was little known to the public but for whom their daughters felt far greater sympathy? By crossing those borders with what their prologue calls ‘a unique, intimate and candid account of our parents’ complexities and interweaving relationships’, they have written a book that will be ‘of interest’ to many readers, no matter what their usual focus.