Australia's War in the Mediterranean

How Florence Nightingale David saved lives during the Blitz – with statistics

How Florence Nightingale David saved lives during the Blitz – with statistics

Dec 9, 2024

Reading time: 6 minutes
In 1939, Florence Nightingale David was living in the village of Bledlow in Buckinghamshire, alongside a number of her female academic colleagues at University College London (UCL). This included Eileen Evans, a phonetics lecturer, Elizabeth Bigg-Wither, a lecturer in Italian, and Joyce Townsend, research assistant, secretary, and illustrator to the zoologist DMS Watson. Born in Herefordshire in 1909, David’s parents had been friends with the Crimean War nurse Florence Nightingale, who she was named after. She would complete her degree in Mathematics at Bedford College for Women in 1931, and joined UCL as a research assistant in statistics, before completing her doctorate in 1938 and continued her work at the college until 1939.

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Allied Outpost: the History of Goodenough Island

Allied Outpost: the History of Goodenough Island

Dec 4, 2024

Reading time: 11 minutes
From the most ancient settlers, over 50,000 years ago, to battling empires in the 20th century, Goodenough Island has offered a vantage point over the Solomon Sea and an eastern gateway to the island of Papua. 
A peacefully settled island for much of its history, Goodenough was also the site of one of Australia’s earliest daring successes in the struggle against the Empire of Japan.

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Weekly History Quiz No.243

Weekly History Quiz No.243

Nov 29, 2024

1. Which Native American confederation reached an agreement of mutual defense and trade with the British colonists at Plymouth in 1621?
Try the full 10 question quiz.

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The Worst Predictions Throughout History

The Worst Predictions Throughout History

Nov 27, 2024

Reading time: 9 minutes
It’s often said that predicting the future is like betting against God.

Despite this, humans have always loved to try and predict the future -whether it’s dismissing new technology or predicting the end of the world, throughout history there have been some interesting predictions made.

Some have been correct. Most have not.

And then there are those predictions that are so spectacularly wrong they make you laugh. Collating some of the worst predictions throughout history, here’s the most interesting, the most incorrect, and the most ironic.

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Military History

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Political and Economic History

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Farmers or foragers? Pre-colonial Aboriginal food production was hardly that simple

Farmers or foragers? Pre-colonial Aboriginal food production was hardly that simple

Nov 11, 2024

Reading time: 6 minutes Farmers versus foragers is a huge oversimplification of what was a mosaic of food production. After all, Australian landscapes differ markedly, from tropical rainforest to snowy mountains to arid spinifex country. For many Aboriginal people, the terms “farming” and “hunter-gatherer” do not capture the realities of 60 millennia of food production.

Social and Cultural History

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History Audiobooks

A Voyage Towards the South Pole and Round the World – Audiobook

A Voyage Towards the South Pole and Round the World – Audiobook

On his first journey Cook mapped the east coast of Australia, on his second the British Admiralty sent him into the vast Southern Ocean. Equipped with one of the first accurate chronometers, Cook pushed his small vessel not merely into the Roaring Forties or the Furious Fifties but become the first explorer to penetrate the Antarctic Circle, reaching an incredible Latitude 71 degrees South, just failing to discover Antarctica.

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History Guild would like to acknowledge the Boonwurrung people, the Traditional Custodians of the land on which we are based, and pay our respects to their Elders, past, present and emerging.