Urgent History

How do societies respond to war’s devastation? In this episode, co-host Carolyn Strange asks Filip Slaveski to answer that question, tapping his expertise in the history of Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union, especially Russia and Ukriane. Revolution and famine preceded the waves of violence and destruction of the Second World War. What strategies and resources allowed ordinary people to survive, to cope, to retain hope and rebuild their lives once the guns fell silent, or at least were muted? How can we better understand Ukraine’s response to Russia’s recent attacks through that past?

What was it like to be a queen in the Roman, Byzantine and Medieval period? In this episode we discuss how elite women experienced peril alongside privilege. Historian of late Antiquity, Dr. Meaghan McEvoy, recounts tales of women entangled in political jockeying, unhappy marriages and risky reproduction. Did the rise of Christianity provide queens and their daughters preferable alternatives? How can we reconceive contemporary notions of female leadership through its longer history?  

How can studying expeditions recast the history of colonisation? In this episode, historian Professor Martin Thomas recounts the dynamics of mutual discovery in the last gasp of imperial exploration in Australia’s Arnhem Land in the 1940s. The American expeditioners considered themselves the clever men, but how did Aboriginal leaders express their expertise, artistry and spirituality? After the blows of dispossession and the theft of human remains, how can we think more deeply about the obligations and meanings of reconciliation? 

Can we understand the demise of legacy media and the rise of social media as the primary source of news without knowledge of news media in the past? In this episode, historian Associate Professor Una McIlvenna highlights the use of song in conveying news – of crime, of disasters, of political events in European, British and Australian history. How was the news sung and how can historians recover evidence of those customs? When and why did singing the news give way to different genres and media? Is the hyper-emotional, dramatic world of online news really new?

Although most of us have or had grandparents in our lives, where do our generational connections fit within broader social, cultural, economic and political frames? In this episode, Dr. Liz Allen puts her historical demographer’s lens on grandparenting in Australia since the mid-twentieth century. How have migration, housing design, longer lifespans and the rising cost of living shaped the pleasures and demands of grandparenting? Have parent -grandparent-relations changed in an increasingly multicultural Australia? As funding for childcare erodes, is the state expecting grandparents and ‘grand friends’ to pick up the slack?

How do war crimes differ from the horrors of war? In this episode emeritus Professor of History, Robert Cribb, focuses on thirteen people prosecuted for war crimes following Japan’s defeat in World War Two. How can we explain what led certain combatants and civilians to commit war crimes? Considering the mass casualties of civilians perpetrated by Allied forces, were these trials victors’ justice? How did prosecutors determine individual culpability, and how did the accused defend their actions? Have we entered a period when the will to identify war crimes and to hold war criminals has withered?

In this podcast, we try to make sense of some universities’ attempts to do away with face-to-face lectures – the most ancient and enduring form of teaching. We explore how this trend might impact humanities courses, history especially, in tertiary education, and what it means for the value of education in our time.

In this podcast we ask how the philosophers of the 18th century got it so wrong, that is how their hopes of the Enlightenment leading to peace and prosperity, instead, led to fanaticism and bloodshed. Can we trace the roots of today’s political extremism among western democracies, from Trump’s America to Orban’s Hungary, to this juncture?

In this podcast we examine the historical roots of the contemporary cost-of-living crisis, particularly in Australia, but also more broadly in the West. We ask where the decline in real living standards of Australian workers and the corresponding growth of poverty and inequality in Australia came from. Was it only from COVID? What about the last financial crisis in 2008? Or later developments? Are these things connected and how doe get out of this crisis?