商品簡介
'It is the duty of historians to be, wherever they can, accurate, precise, humane, imaginative - using moral imagination above all ? and even-handed.' - Alan Atkinson The second of three volumes of the landmark, award-winning series The Europeans in Australia gives an account of early settlement by Britain. It tells of the political and intellectual origins of this extraordinary undertaking that began during the 1780s, a decade of extraordinary creativity and the climax of the European Enlightenment. Volume Two, Democracy, takes the story from around 1815 to the early 1870s. By exploring the nineteenth-century ?communications revolution' Atkinson casts new light on the way Australia first found its place in a ?global' world. This volume is more than a story of geography and politics. It describes the way people thought and felt. Throughout the trilogy Atkinson traces subtle and sudden shifts of ?common imagination' by analysing the lives of both powerful and ordinary Australians. He sets out the ideas and the imagery that moved and marked the people. This book, like all his work, is grounded in thorough and rigorous scholarship yet imbued with compassion and insight. Written ?from the inside', it is ? as he says ? history ?caught up with the flesh and memory it describes'. The culmination of an extraordinary career in the writing and teaching of Australian history, The Europeans in Australia grapples with the Australian historical experience as a whole from the point of view of the settlers from Europe. Ambitious and unique, it is the first such large, single-author account since Manning Clark's A History of Australia.
作者簡介
ALAN ATKINSON was born in Sydney and grew up in southern Queensland. He was an undergraduate at University of Sydney and has a PhD from the Australian National University in Canberra, as well as a Masters degree from Trinity College, The University of Dublin. His books include Camden: Farm and Village Life in Early New South Wales (1988), which helped to introduce new forms of social history to Australia, and The Commonwealth of Speech (2002), an argument about history writing in the twenty-first century and about the links between the national past and present. From 1981 to 2008 he was employed at the University of New England, New South Wales, a university with distinctive teaching traditions, and more recently as senior tutor at St Paul’s College, University of Sydney. He has been a Fulbright scholar and a visiting fellow at the universities of Cambridge, London and Melbourne, and at the Australian National University. He is married to Catherine Pound, with three adult children.
