Advocacy Archives

Safeguarding our Heritage – Why we must fund Trove

by History Guild | Feb 16, 2023 | Advocacy, Social and Cultural History | 0

Reading time: 2 minutes
Trove, the National Library of Australia’s (NLA) public online database, has grown to include over 6 billion individual items. These include everything from newspapers and magazines to photographs, parliamentary papers, government and organisational reports, theses and research, audio, video and books. These are items from the NLA’s archives as well as contributions from over 1,000 organisations across Australia. These groups have been contributing thousands of volunteer hours to the task of preserving, collating, digitising and describing important artefacts from Australia’s history. They did this safe in the knowledge that it would then be maintained and safeguarded for future generations.

Roman Britain was multi-ethnic – so why does this upset people so much?

by History Guild | Feb 13, 2023 | Advocacy, Political and Economic History, Social and Cultural History | 0

Reading time: 4 minutes
Mary Beard, professor of classics at the University of Cambridge, has recently been at the receiving end of a “torrent of aggressive insults” for suggesting that Britain under the Roman empire – which at its height stretched from northern Africa to Scotland – was ethnically diverse. The trouble started when Beard described an educational cartoon produced by the BBC, which included a black Roman solider in Britain, as “pretty accurate”.

Would London Fire Brigades really let your house burn down if you were uninsured?

by History Guild | Jan 17, 2023 | Advocacy, Political and Economic History | 0

Reading time: 4 minutes
Here’s an interesting fact: if you didn’t pay your insurance premiums in 17th and 18th century London, firefighters would simply let your house burn, even if they were on the scene. This fact has been repeated many times by many people, so it must be true, right? Or is it?

Why we must better understand our history

by History Guild | Jan 12, 2023 | Advocacy, Political and Economic History, Social and Cultural History | 0

Reading time: 5 minutes
History never repeats itself, but it does often rhyme. Mark Twain.
As a society it is vitally important that we understand our own history, as well as the history of other peoples throughout time. This is the only way we can make informed decisions about how we should approach the challenges that we face in the present and the future.

Popular Histories Have Influenced World Leaders, Sometimes For the Better

by History Guild | Dec 13, 2022 | Advocacy, Political and Economic History | 0

Reading time: 6 minutes
Sometimes presidents are influenced by history books. Bill Clinton consulted Balkan Ghosts: A Journey Through History by Robert Kaplan when dealing with conflicts in southeastern Europe. In 2008 Barack Obama consulted Jonathan Alter’s The Defining Moment: FDR’s Hundred Days and the Triumph of Hope for ideas about launching a strong presidency. Joe Biden liked The Soul of America: The Battle for Our Better Angels so much that he made its author, Jon Meacham, a key adviser. No historian, however, has made a more significant impact on an American president’s thoughts and actions than Barbara Tuchman. President John F. Kennedy drew important lessons from one of her books when seeking a peaceful resolution of the Cuban Missile Crisis.

Saving the Nation’s Memory Bank

by History Guild | Jun 15, 2021 | Advocacy | 0

The National Archives of Australia is at risk due to chronic underfunding. Many important records...

Finding Your Ancestors: Researching Aboriginal Family History in NSW

by History Guild | Jun 6, 2021 | Advocacy | 0

Most Aboriginal people are already historians. They hold knowledge of family ancestry, culture and...

Australian government must negotiate a treaty with First Nations people

by History Guild | Feb 1, 2021 | Advocacy, Political and Economic History, Social and Cultural History | 0

Estimated reading time: 5 minutes By Lidia Thorpe With 26 January looming, many Australians will...

Stop telling students to study STEM instead of humanities for the post-coronavirus world

by History Guild | Dec 24, 2020 | Advocacy | 0

Alan Sears, University of New Brunswick and Penney Clark, University of British Columbia Finally,...

Secondary school textbooks teach our kids the myth that Aboriginal Australians were nomadic hunter-gatherers

by History Guild | Dec 8, 2020 | Advocacy, Social and Cultural History | 0

Robyn Moore, University of Tasmania In his book Dark Emu, Bruce Pascoe writes that settler...

Slavery Compensation: Who Got Paid?

by History Guild | Nov 4, 2020 | Advocacy, Political and Economic History, Social and Cultural History | 0

With the abolition of slavery in the British Empire in 1837 the British Government presided over the largest transfer of wealth to individuals in history. No portion of this was paid to the people who were enslaved. Instead it went to thousands of slave owners across the globe as compensation for their loss of ‘assets’.