Frontier conflict: Ethical visions in the writing of history
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Description
This talk presents work-in-progress on a book I am writing about history-writing and frontier conflict in settler societies, including Aotearoa New Zealand, Australia, the United States, and South Africa. In these places, the idea of the frontier was critical to the development of nationalist sentiment and national historiography.
A 'frontier thesis' first proposed by the Wisconsin historian Frederick Jackson Turner, and influential on historians in other settler societies, linked frontier history with progress and democracy. However, indigenous resistance to colonisation, particularly on the frontiers of settlement in the nineteenth century, has long troubled the idea of the frontier as a progressive force in history-writing.
This book explores how historians have deployed and been challenged about the ethical visions inherent in their work when writing about 'frontier conflict', and Indigenous resistance.
Speaker Bios
Dr. Miranda Johnson is a senior lecturer in the History Programme at the University of Otago. A historian of the modern Pacific world, focusing on colonial, indigenous, and cross-cultural histories, she is the author of the prize-winning book The Land Is Our History: Indigeneity, Law, and the Settler State (Oxford University Press, 2016) and co-editor with Warwick Anderson and Barbara Brookes of Pacific Futures: Past and Present (University of Hawai‘i Press, 2018). She has also taught at the University of Sydney and the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
https://vuw.zoom.us/meeting/register/tJEsceqqqzgtHNCJqBNXQIxmkB-fgTxrGVti
For more information contact: Valerie Wallace
valerie.wallace@vuw.ac.nz