Professional Historian and History Consultancy Services Brisbane
Featured Image: Dr Neville Buch in the Sinclair Lewis Collection, Port Washington, Long Island, New York State (USA). Dear Dr. Buch, It was a pleasure to meet you this afternoon and show you the PWPL’s materials on Sinclair Lewis. Here is a link to a Google Arts and Culture page the History Center put together…
Dear American friends, I am leaving Brisbane, Queensland, Australia, tonight, for a country I have critically admired my whole life. It is the second trip, the last in 30 years (1991-1992). An intelligent conversation, the last few days, has indicated to me that I need to clarify where I am coming from as an American-Australian…
A Critical Review of 2022 Theos Annual Lecture by Tom Holland, published by Humanist Australia Inc. on the Medium platform. Follow the link: https://medium.com/australian-humanist/a-critical-review-of-2022-theos-annual-lecture-by-tom-holland-d4268e11e7c0
The 2022 Australian and New Zealand History of Education (ANZHES) Conference From selections of the ANZHES Newsletter December 2022, with comments. This blog article — call it what you like — “academic”, “populist”, “community”, any political semantics, to ignore it, Minister of Education, cannot be so dismissed. The communities demand an answer on the state…
Introduction Today, we hear stories of Orthodox Judaism, and in this recent article from The Chronicle of Higher Education, we learn that ‘new orthodoxy’ is a ‘thing’. Image: Online story, Sylvia Goodman. ‘Alternative’ or ‘Sham’? Yeshiva U. Created a New LGBTQ Club — but Won’t Recognize the One That Sued, The Chronicle of Higher…
I am responding to the below-mentioned Campaign and the thinking in reaction to a meme, posted on the Facebook page of the Queensland Parents for Secular State Schools. “This, in a nutshell, is why [meme] there should be no religious instruction in public schools. It doesn’t get more divisive and judgemental than this.…
Dear Editor, InQueensland , I am a member of the Professional Historians Association (Queensland) Inc., Australian Historical Association Inc., and my work over the decade goes to the Mapping Brisbane History (MBH) Project, and the Brisbane Southside History Network (BSHN), and I am the President of the Southern Brisbane Suburban Forum (SBSF). …
My new sociological model. Politicians and bureaucrats at the top, bottom-thinking in a tight bubble of a worldview, and thinking well of their ‘success’. The public frustrated at policy failure. And policy researchers and developers in the squeeze of being under-deployed and under-utilised in their careers. The solutions are maddeningly obvious to the educated, but…
Wright Mills’ The Power Elite (1956) has been a major sociological work that has repeatedly been the right framework to understand the political and social chaos I have experienced and witnessed in my lifetime. It is not a perfect work and not a perfect model. The sociologist examines three firmly interlocked prongs of American power:…
This is a blog post to set everyone straight, which makes me open to the critique of being one of Manning Clark’s ‘straighteners’; but that’s another story. My arguments, as a general framework, is based on a basic critique of the neo-conservative paradigm. The paradigm is a defence of a cultural position(s) which has become…