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 131-078 On the Edge of History

Credit Points

25

HECS Band

1

Coordinator

Assoc Prof A Mayne

Prerequisites

Usually 25 points of First Year History.

Semester

1 (view timetable)

Contact

Two 2-hour time blocks per week, each consisting of a lecture and linked seminar, plus twelve additional hours of excursions and fieldwork during the semester (totalling 60 contact hours for the semester)

Subject Description

This subject examines European settlement along the Pacific coasts of North America, Australia, and New Zealand. It focuses especially upon Victoria and British Columbia, where colonists saw themselves as forging new communities on the rim of the civilised world. An analysis of their efforts takes us to the edge of orthodox history making, to the neglected histories of fur trading, fishing, sealing, and whaling; of mining and lumbering; of pastoralism and township formation. We will also study the ways these societies - divided by race, gender, and class - developed, urbanised, and self-consciously projected themselves as modern. The subject enables students to mesh history with archaeology in order to interrogate both the material and documentary traces of the past, and in so doing to develop an ethnographic perspective upon the cultures of overlooked people and forgotten events and places.

Assessment

Written work totalling 8000 words.



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