The Telling of Civil Rights

09/02/13 • 17 min

The history of civil rights in the US has been dominated by debates on the role of Martin Luther King. Some historians have argued for a longer history of civil rights extending from well before King’s speech. Such a history incorporates, for example, the work of the union movement amongst black workers in the 1940s North and South.

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Postcolonialism and Making History

Postcolonial histories generally focus on the relationship between the colonizing country and the colonized peoples (in this case, Japan and Koreans) in specific historical contexts. Themes of suffering and trauma often dominate postcolonial historiographical writing and they often contain pointed critiques of colonization as a model for the modern nation-state.

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How Materials can be Used to Make History

The cultural ‘turn’ of the 1990s remains one of the most powerful influences in modern history writing. Cultural historians often emphasise everyday life within historical societies and rely on methodologies borrowed from anthropology.