Abstract
It’s Saturday. You go to the best bookshop in town. Look around at the books — the exciting new hardbacks and the stylish, bestselling paperbacks. They look so enticing and appealing. Matt and shiny covers feature dramatic titles hustling to grab your attention. Sometimes the titles make promises beyond what the books deliver, so you may be a little wary. You pick up one that interests you, and check out the beginning. Can you judge whether it will be a good read, and what topics and eras this book spans?
The King of Hearts’ advice to Alice: Begin at the beginning … and go on till you come to the end: then stop.’
LEWIS CARROLL, ALICE’S ADVENTURES IN WONDERLAND1
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Notes
Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, 1865.
Catherine Hall, Civilising Subjects: Metropole and colony in the English imagination 1830–1867 (London: Polity Press, 2002), 1, 7.
Muriel E. Chamberlain, The Longman Companion to European Decolonisation in the Twentieth Century (London: Longman, 1998), viii.
John Hobson, The Eastern Origins of Western Civilisation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), x.
William C. Dowling, ‘Avoiding the warmed-over dissertation’, in Eleanor Harman & Ian Montagnes, eds, The Thesis and the Book (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2003), 50.
Mark Atwood Lawrence, Assuming the Burden: Europe and the American commitment to war in Vietnam (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005), 4–6.
Anne Salmond, Two Worlds: First meetings between Maori and Europeans, 1642–1772 (Auckland: Viking, 1991), 13.
Richard White, The Middle Ground: Indians, empires, and republics in the Great Lakes region, 1650–1815 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 1.
Iain McCalman, The Seven Ordeals of Count Cagliostro: The greatest enchanter of the eighteenth century (Sydney: Flamingo—Harper Collins, 2003), 3.
Alan Atkinson, Camden: Farm and village life in early New South Wales (Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1988), 1.
Carlo Ginzburg, The Cheese and the Worms: The cosmos of a sixteenth century miller (London: Penguin, 1992 [1976]), 1.
Lionel Gossman, Anecdote and history’, History and Theory, 42.2 (2003): 143–68.
See William E. Engel, Aphorism, anecdote and anamnesis in Montaigne and Bacon’, Montaigne Studies: An Interdisciplinary Forum 1, no. 1 (1989): 158–79; entry on ‘Montaigne’ in Britannica.com.
Lyndal Roper, Witch Craze: Terror and fantasy in Baroque Germany (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004), 1, 4.
Mary Dudziak, ColdWar, Civil Rights: Race and the image of American democracy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), 115.
Penelope Lively, Moon Tiger (London: Penguin, 1988), 1, 2.
Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, Carnival in Romans: A people’s uprising at Romans 1579–1580 (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1981), 338–9.
See Peter Burke, ed., New Perspectives on Historical Writing (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1991), 239–40;
Hayden White, Tropics of Discourse: Essays in cultural criticism (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978), especially chapter 3.
Howard G. Brown, Ending the French Revolution: Violence, justice, and repression from the Terror to Napoleon (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2006), 2, 3.
Jane Lydon, Eye Contact: Photographing Indigenous Australians (Durham: Duke University Press, 2005).
Marcus Rediker, The Slave Ship: A human history (New York: Viking, 2007), 4, 355.
Les Carlyon, The Great War (Sydney: Pan Macmillan, 2006), 3, 777.
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© 2011 Ann Curthoys and Ann McGrath
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Curthoys, A., McGrath, A. (2011). Once upon a time. In: How to Write History that People Want to Read. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-0-230-30496-3_7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-0-230-30496-3_7
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