Alike in many aspects of their histories, Australia and the United States diverge in striking ways when it comes to their working classes, labor relations, and politics.Greg Patmore and Shelton Stromquist curate innovative essays that use transnational and comparative analysis to explore the two nations’ differences. The contributors examine five major areas: World War I’s impact on labor and socialist movements; the history of coerced labor; patterns of ethnic and class identifica...

While the Great War raged, Australians were twice asked to vote on the question of military conscription for overseas service. The recourse to popular referendum on such an issue at such a time was without precedent anywhere in the world. The campaigns precipitated mass mobilisation, bitter argument, a split in the Labor Party, and the fall of a government. The defeat of the proposals was hailed by some as a victory of democracy over militarism, mourned by others as an expression of politi...

The British Empire, wrote Adam Smith, 'has hitherto been not an empire, but the project of an empire' and John Darwin offers a magisterial global history of the rise and fall of that great imperial project. The British Empire, he argues, was much more than a group of colonies ruled over by a scattering of British expatriates until eventual independence. It was, above all, a global phenomenon. Its power derived rather less from the assertion of imperial authority than from the fusing togeth...

The Will of the People is an incisive, in-depth look at Winston Churchill’s lifelong commitment to parliamentary democracy. First elected at twenty-five, Churchill was still in the House of Commons sixty-four years later. By far the largest part of his life – of his working days and nights – was spent in the cut and thrust of debate in the service of the people, whose instrument he believed Parliament to be. “I am a child of the House of Commons,” he told a joint session o...

'Australian governments find it easy to go to war. Their leaders seem to be able to withdraw with a calm conscience, answerable neither to God nor humanity.'Australia lost 600 men in the Boer War, a three-year conflict fought in the heart of Africa that had ostensibly nothing to do with Australia. Coinciding with Federation, the war kickstarted Australia's commitment to fighting in Britain's wars overseas, and forged a national identity around it. By 1902, when the Boer War ended, ...

First published as part of the best-selling The Oxford Illustrated History of Britain, Christopher Harvie and Colin Matthew's Very Short Introduction to Nineteenth-Century Britain is a sharp but subtle account of remarkable economic and social change and an even more remarkable political stability. Britain in 1789 was overwhelmingly rural, agrarian, multilingual, and almost half Celtic. By 1914, when it faced its greatest test since the defeat of Napoleon, it was largely ...

In recent years Anzac – an idea as much as an actual army corps – has become the dominant force within Australian history, overshadowing everything else. The commemoration of Anzac Day is bigger than ever, while Remembrance Day, VE Day, VP Day and other military anniversaries grow in significance each year. Pilgrimages to Gallipoli, the Somme and Kokoda are commonplace and popular military history dominates the bestseller lists. Anzac has seemingly become a sacred, untouchable element of t...

John Curtin, prime minister during the darkest days of the Second World War, is remembered as the reluctant hero of Australian politics. In the Australian story he is the recovering alcoholic and the accidental prime minister who saved Australia from invasion by Japan, overrode the opposition of Churchill and Roosevelt to bring home Australian troops from the Middle East, and created the Australian alliance with the United States. However, there is much more to the Curtin story than this.

In the months following his resignation as PM in late August 1941, Menzies swayed between relief at his release from the burdens of office as PM and despair that his life at the top had come to so little.Many followers of Australian political history, including Liberal party supporters, forget that Robert Menzies had many years in the political wilderness not knowing he would end up being Australia's longest-serving prime minister. This book focuses on the period between 1...

Fighting Anzacs have metamorphosed from flesh and blood into mythic icons. The war they fought in is distant and the resistance to it within Australia has been forgotten. In the Shadow of Gallipoli corrects this historical amnesia by looking at what was happening on the Australian home front during WWI. It shows that the war was a disaster, and many Australians knew it. Discontent and dissent grew into major revolt. Bollard considers the wartime strike wave, including the Great St...

In Australia's rush to commemorate all things Anzac, have we lost our ability to look beyond war as the central pillar of Australia's history and identity?The passionate historians of the Honest History group argue that while war has been important to Australia – mostly for its impact on our citizens and our ideas of nationhood – we must question the stories we tell ourselves about our history. We must separate myth from reality – and to do that we need to reassess...

Winner of the Dafoe Book PrizeWinner of the University of British Columbia Medal for Canadian Biography1995 marked the 100th anniversary of that most charismatic and enigmatic public figure, the thirteenth prime minister of Canada, John George Diefenbaker. Beloved and reviled with equal passion, he was a politician possessed of a flamboyant, self-fabulizing nature that is the essential ingredient of spellbinding biography.After several runs at politi...