Australia's War in the Mediterranean

Where did the new year’s resolution come from? Well, we’ve been making them for 4,000 years

Where did the new year’s resolution come from? Well, we’ve been making them for 4,000 years

Dec 26, 2024

Reading time: 5 minutes
As we welcome in the new year, a common activity across many cultures is the setting of new year resolutions. New year represents a significant temporal milestone in the calendar when many people set new goals for the year ahead. Here in Australia, over 70% of men and women (over 14 million Australians) are reported to have set at least one new year resolution in 2022.

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60 years old, the Yirrkala Bark Petitions are one of our founding documents – so why don’t we know more about them?

60 years old, the Yirrkala Bark Petitions are one of our founding documents – so why don’t we know more about them?

Dec 23, 2024

Reading time: 17 minutes
Each of these declamatory objects speaks back to power, a creative act of resistance to a perceived political injustice. Like the stories of the creation, presentation and reception of the Eureka Flag and the women’s suffrage petition, the story of the Bark Petitions takes us to a time when democratic inclusion, when basic entitlements of citizenship, could not be taken for granted by certain sections of the body politic.

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Four Video Games That Actually Teach History

Four Video Games That Actually Teach History

Dec 18, 2024

Reading time: 13 minutes
There are plenty of video games that use historical backdrops for their narrative, or even entice you to recreate history in some way. As we discuss with historian Pieter van den Heede in our article on whether games can teach history, the question remains of how much you actually learn while playing these games. Thankfully, some do a much better job than others, and in this article, I will go over four of them.

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Military History

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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.

Political and Economic History

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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.

Social and Cultural History

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Revisiting the “Knickerbocker” Origin Story of Santa Claus

Revisiting the “Knickerbocker” Origin Story of Santa Claus

Dec 16, 2024

Reading time: 6 minutes In December 1953, Dr. Charles W. Jones, a University of California professor hailed as one of the world’s foremost scholars on St. Nicholas of Myra, gave a speech to the New-York Historical Society that was published the following year in the society’s quarterly under the title “Knickerbocker Santa Claus.” The premise of Jones’ speech was that author Washington Irving invented Santa Claus in an 1809 satire, A History of New York, that was purportedly written by a completely fictional Dutch historian, Diedrich Knickerbocker. “Without Irving there would be no Santa Claus,” Jones wrote. “Santa Claus was a parasitic germ until the Knickerbocker History in 1809; after 1809 Santa Claus spread like a plague which has yet to reach its peak.”

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.