Category: Social and Cultural History

Ustaše in Australia: the “Citadel” of a Fascist Legacy

Ustaše in Australia: the “Citadel” of a Fascist Legacy

by | Oct 22, 2025 | , | 0

Reading time: 14 minutes
Between 1947 and 1952, for 170,000 non-Jewish “displaced persons,” Australia offered a chance to exit the dark, harrowing night of World War II in Europe. Many of these were hungry, traumatised, seeking peace and shelter, a place to work and rebuild. But with them came the kind of settlers which populate nightmares: war criminals, outright fascists, and aiders and abettors of the Nazi regime and its puppets in Eastern Europe.

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Hindi, Greek and English all come from a single ancient language – here’s how we know

Hindi, Greek and English all come from a single ancient language – here’s how we know

by | Oct 20, 2025 | , | 0

Reading time: 5 minutes
Yet patterns in their descendant languages preserve enough structure to enable us to manage at least a shadowy glimpse of them. The theories and methods pioneered through this work will continue to fuel research into the reconstruction of human ethnolinguistic prehistories worldwide for many years to come.

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Tutmania: How Ancient Egypt Defined the Roaring Twenties

Tutmania: How Ancient Egypt Defined the Roaring Twenties

by | Oct 15, 2025 | | 0

Reading time: 6 minutes

As the year 1922 dragged to a close, a weary public feared that it was doomed to die in doldrums. On the harrowing heels of World War I and the Spanish Flu pandemic came a “summer journalistically so dull that an English farmer’s report of a gooseberry the size of a crabapple achieved the main news pages of the London metropolitan dailies.” One Lord Carnarvon remembered that “the public was in a state of boredom with news of reparations, conferences, and mandates, and craved for some new topic of conversation.”

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New evidence confirms our Indigenous languages have a common source, but how they spread remains a mystery

New evidence confirms our Indigenous languages have a common source, but how they spread remains a mystery

by | Sep 29, 2025 | | 0

Reading time: 6 minutes
Have you ever wondered how Australia’s many Indigenous languages relate to one another and how far back the connections go? The Australian continent has been settled by Indigenous people for at least 50,000 years, but just how old are the languages spoken today and where did they originate? Our research provides some answers to these questions – and the answers throw up new and interesting puzzles.

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Lessons from the UN peacekeeping mission in Rwanda, three decades after the genocide it failed to stop

Lessons from the UN peacekeeping mission in Rwanda, three decades after the genocide it failed to stop

by | Sep 25, 2025 | , , | 0

Reading time: 6 minutes
Dispatched with a fatally timid mission, many ordinary U.N. soldiers in Rwanda took extraordinary actions, using diplomacy, cultural awareness and community engagement. Their actions saved close to 30,000 lives, according to Romeo Dallaire, who led the U.N.’s deployment in Rwanda. Learning from what actually worked on this famously failed mission can save lives in the future.

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Napoleon’s bicentenary: why celebrating the French emperor has become so controversial

Napoleon’s bicentenary: why celebrating the French emperor has become so controversial

by | Sep 23, 2025 | , , | 0

Reading time: 5 minutes
Napoleon Bonaparte may have died 200 years ago, but the vast ramifications of his rule can still be felt – and not only in France. This year marks the last in a series of bicentenaries since 1969, the 200th anniversary of his birth, but the chance to give the most famous emperor in French history another send-off is proving distinctly tricky – and not only because of COVID-19 restrictions.

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How the Great War shaped the foundations of Australia’s future

How the Great War shaped the foundations of Australia’s future

by | Sep 10, 2025 | , , | 0

Reading time: 9 minutes
It is striking that 2015 is the 110th anniversary of the Gallipoli offensive, the 80th anniversary of end of the Second World War in the Pacific, and the 50th anniversary of the end of the Vietnam War. This is a good time to reflect not only on the actions of those wars, but on their consequences and their enduring legacies.

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Why history instruction is critical for combating online misinformation

Why history instruction is critical for combating online misinformation

by | Sep 3, 2025 | , , | 0

Reading time: 6 minutes
Can you tell fact from fiction online? In a digital world, few questions are more important or more challenging. For years, some commentators have called for K-12 teachers to take on fake news, media literacy, or online misinformation by doubling down on critical thinking. This push for schools to do a better job preparing young people to differentiate between low- and high-quality information often focuses on social studies classes.

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