Professional Historian and History Consultancy Services Brisbane
Category: What Is History Meaning?
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Politics & Society: How much do we need Power and how much do we need Theory?
There are those who disparage politics and there are those who disparage theory. In both cases, such persons are lost; lost to themselves, lost in society, and lost to the world. Here is the Power & Theory PowerPoint Script
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Turchin and Goldstone’s Political Stress Thesis and Historiography
Are we to see a future period of growing instability in the United States and Western Europe which would undermine a progressivist vision, and is made calculable in the Turchin and Goldstone’s political stress thesis (explained in the endnote below)? The predictions here are probably ‘on the money’, that is, the probability…
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The Light of Ben Chifley
The 12 July 2020, just passed, was the 75th anniversary of Ben Chifley becoming Australia’s 16th Prime Minister, where he remained until 1949. It is interesting times in Australian political history. Chifley was Minister for Postwar Reconstruction from 1942 to 1945 in the John Curtin Labor government, and until he replaced Curtin at Curtin’s…
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Embrace Messy History — Thinking about Race, Class, Gender, and the Sense of Place in Our Own Past (and not limited to the Other Person’s)
Trae Crowder has a series of videos in ‘Southin’ Off’ to explain the complex, but pointed, history of the American South region. It has been a very educative series, but one episode has to be listen to; in order to understand the nature of history, not necessarily of the other person’s, but of our own…
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The Dirge for a Sentimental Bloke
‘The Songs of a Sentimental Bloke’, originally a poem novel by C. J. Dennis, tells the story of Bill, a larrikin of the Little Lonsdale Street push, who is introduced to a young woman by the name of Doreen. The book chronicles their courtship and marriage, detailing Bill’s transformation from a violence-prone gang member to…
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Why People Switch Off in a Global Pandemic or National Emergency
ID 31478396 © Iqoncept | Dreamstime.com There is a fundamental problem of the advertising and public relations industry. It is a problem that leads to persons switching off at the very moment that the message might be vital. The players play on cheap slogans, not intelligence. Intelligence is the capacity to deal with complex…
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Globalizing Horizon and the Social Imaginary
ID 144151396 © Agsandrew | Dreamstime.com “…social theorists averted the previously dedicated gaze on a Spirit that moves amongst us in mysterious ways, and sought to shift our attention from a universalizing cosmology to a globalizing horizon where humans make that spirit. This can be described as a shift from cosmology to constructivism. By…
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Conscious Existence: Realistic or Romantic?
ID 144151396 © Agsandrew | Dreamstime.com I know I am a romantic, but a romantic invested in realism. It is probably not as unusual as assumed. I make a claim for reality and I understand that such a claim is far too romantic. We grasp for what we individually want and it is always illusory;…
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Is it Really about Being Radical or Not?
ID 9805130 © Chelovek | Dreamstime.com It is a big news day. As I write this blog, the Impeachment Vote is being carried out in the United States House of Representatives. It is a radical action; an action that seeks the root intention of the American constitutional writers, a few centuries ago. Earlier I…
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Mapping Locations on the Mind-Brain Belief Spectrum
Here is a graph where a person can map their own beliefs on questions of mind-brain, and map the positioning of other thinkers across the past-present-future continuum. The movement from left to right are possibilities of belief from an unquestioning supernaturalism to an empty materialism. Supernaturalism hangs on the ancient idea…