Clare Corbould

http://www.deakin.edu.au/about-deakin/people/clare-corbould

Historian Clare Corbould is Associate Head of School (Research) in the School of Humanities and Social Sciences at Deakin University. She is the author of Becoming African Americans (Harvard, 2009) and co-editor of Remembering the Revolution (Massachusetts, 2013). With Michael McDonnell she is writing a history of African Americans and the legacy of the American Revolution. For more information, see her staff webpage: https://experts.deakin.edu.au/43359-Clare-Corbould.

Clare Corbould reviews 'The Zealot and the Emancipator: John Brown, Abraham Lincoln and the struggle for American freedom' by H.W. Brands

March 2021, no. 429 • 22 February 2021

Lerone Bennett Jr, bestselling author of Black history, ruffled feathers with a 1968 article in the glossy monthly magazine Ebony. ‘Was Abe Lincoln a White Supremacist?’ the piece’s title asked provocatively. The title of Bennett’s later book on the topic proclaimed that Lincoln was Forced into Glory. Mainstream media either ignored or denigrated Bennett’s work, but his insights about Li ... (read more)

Clare Corbould reviews 'Atticus Finch: The biography' by Joseph Crespino

September 2018, no. 404 • 23 August 2018

When I taught African American history at the University of Sydney, students read the words of Booker T. Washington, Ida B. Wells, Marcus Garvey, and Martin Luther King Jr. They discussed the relative merits of each leader’s strategies. In every class – mostly white students, including some migrants and children of migrants – a majority favoured Washington over the three more militant altern ... (read more)

Clare Corbould reviews 'History at the Crossroads: Australians and the Past' by Paul Ashton and Paula Hamilton

September 2011, no. 334 • 23 August 2011

‘The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there,’ said historian David Lowenthal in 1985, adopting L.P. Hartley’s famous opening line from The Go-Between. Most historians agree, proceeding from the premise that the past is remote and in need of discovery, and that there is no automatic link between people in the present and those in the past. It is a supposition in complete ... (read more)