Image supplied by Matthew Kelleher 

Matthew Kelleher is the author of Human Rights: Act of Idealism or Pragmatism? The Curious Case of Ramon Colon and the New York State Division of Human Rights recently published in Volume 7, number 1 of History in the Making.

As part of our fourth instalment of our ‘author in focus’ blog series for 2020, Matthew discusses his research and writing practices and has some excellent advice for other history students interested in submitting their writing for peer review.

How did you come to the topic for your History in the Making article?

I originally began my project as an assignment for a 3^rd year history course at the University of Sydney, also called ‘History in the Making’. We were given a large degree of creative control as to the scope of the essay, the only requirement being that it must focus on a primary source. During the first half of the course, we spent time discussing cultural histories, and some particular historians with very engaging writing styles; Robert Darnton, Natalie Zemon-Davis, Clifford Geertz. I have always had an interest in human rights and international law in history, and a project like this allowed me to write from the perspective of an individual caught in an uncertain time for the enforcement of human rights. My goal was to right something as thought-provoking as Darnton’s The Great Cat Massacre. While I don’t think my piece is nearly as impressive, writing about a man who had his rights violated by a human rights organisation seemed as compelling to me as 18^th century Parisians massacring cats!

What’s your writing process?

Personally, I like to begin writing almost straight away. One of my biggest problems when I first began studying history was perfectionism – pouring hours into every sentence so to ensure my first draft was ‘perfect’. Now, I like to read and write at the same time. During my research process, if I find an interesting idea I could incorporate, I try to write four or five sentences of an argument, rather than dot points. I then arrange all of these short paragraphs into a structure, creating a road map for my essay. This process also helps inform the overall argument. It is very difficult to come up with a highly nuanced thesis without having written anything first, nor is it likely to remain the same throughout the writing process. You should always be prepared for the scope of the argument to shift, and reading widely will only get you so far. My advice: write as much as you can, and certainly more than you need. It will certainly reflect in not only how concise your arguments end up, but how expansive your ideas appear in short spaces.

What did you learn from the peer review process?

Do not be surprised if a reviewer does not see your argument the same way as you do. This does not necessarily mean you need to make every change that is suggested; it is important that your writing maintains a strong sense of authorial integrity. However, be honest and open with yourself when reading and considering critique. Weigh up the positives and negatives of changes – will they fundamentally reshape my arguments, do they synchronise well with my writing style? Personally, I did not need to make many major fixes, but it was suggested in some paragraphs I change my argument emphasis. It is important to keep in mind that the peer review process exists to make your essay better. But never blindly make changes because someone has told you too – consider them carefully and apply any critique to the extent you believe it to be appropriate.

What advice would you give to someone considering submitting an article to History in the Making?

Submit! You have nothing to lose from trying and everything to gain if your article is accepted. Publication, in my mind, is the highest honour a writer can receive because it tells you that there are interested readers who really enjoy your work. The whole point of original research is to show the world something fresh, expressing a viewpoint on a particular topic that no one has before. Do not be afraid to tell the world – the worst that can happen is that someone disagrees, debate ensues, and everyone comes out the other side having learnt a little more. From my perspective, that is the joy of learning summarised as concisely as possible!

Do you have any advice for history students trying to study and conduct research during the COVID19 pandemic?

Learn how to use digital databases such as interactive museums and libraries, and if you have access, text and data mining tools. Nothing excites a historian more than being able to access original documents that are virtually priceless and centuries old. However, as all types of sources are becoming increasingly and exclusively digitised, it is important, particularly if you are a modern historian, to familiarise yourself with online research skills. It will save you time and travel in the future, and may open new avenues of thought not attainable via conventional research methods.

Where would you like to take your research next?

I am still deciding whether to begin Honours in History next year or move on to the next stage of my law degree. My interests in human rights history and international law mean I have some flexibility in this regard, however the focus would be markedly different depending which route I decide to follow. Nevertheless, I still, and always will, love writing. That will never change, and I hope to continue to write and publish articles for many years to come.

Image supplied by Alvine Mulligan

Alvine Mulligan is the author of Martin Sharp, Heritage Activist, recently published in Volume 7, Number 1 of History in the Making.

As part of our third instalment of our ‘author in focus’ blog series for 2020, Alvine discusses her research processes and practices and has some excellent advice for history students who are trying to conduct research during the Covid-19 pandemic!

How did you come to the topic for your History in the Making article? 

The topic for my HiTM article came out of having to generate a project idea for one of my undergraduate units at the University of New England, ‘Researching and Applying History’. My very sage lecturer suggested that I take inspiration from the immediate world around me. The inspiration was a poster outside my office -a Martin Sharp poster for a Tiny Tim concert.  It’s a long story, but in the early 2000’s Martin generously donated a signed poster to my son’s special needs school, and he also sent one home for me.  Since Sharp’s death in 2013 his body of creative works have been celebrated alongside his faith and never-ending support of the Luna Park ghost train fire victims.  I wanted to look at Sharp’s relationship with Luna Park in a new light – I wanted to see if I could define his work at Luna Park not just as a mere quirky obsession, or as a piece of commissioned work, but as a true and successful form of advocacy for an important popular culture site in Sydney.  

 What’s your writing process? 

Bringing together your research into a cohesive and engaging piece of writing is the fulfilling, and sometimes difficult (for me), part of studying history.  I work best when making plans before writing – although the plans always get revised and reworked as the research and writing progresses!  I tend to document my research vigorously through short annotations on the value of how each source can be used to support my thesis.  When I was an undergraduate, I always completed the research before writing, but as I progress through honours, I am quickly learning that ‘writing as you go’ is probably a more effective process.  I have a set time and place for writing each day – I throw on the headphones (Mozart’s Requiem is high on rotation), try to let go of my perfectionism and produce some form of writing each day. 

 What did you learn from the peer review process? 

The peer review process was not as daunting as it seemed.  Each reviewer gave valid and directional remarks on how I could improve my paper to ensure it reached the publishable standards of the journal. The process was a rewarding learning experience which improved my writing and academic skills.  

 What advice would you give to someone considering submitting an article to History in the Making? 

Sharing your research and writing is what history is all about so if you’ve written a great piece of original historical research – go for it! There are three important tips that I can give to potential HiTM authors. Firstly, edit your research paper into an article that meets the journal guidelines. Secondly, transform your paper from a great university essay into an outstanding journal article. And lastly for your own sanity, view peer review feedback as invaluable advice – not negative criticism. Once my article had been reviewed, the HiTM editorial team were extremely supportive and encouraging – which, considering our new life during Covid, shows the exceptional dedication the team have in creating a space for history students to share their work.  

 Do you have any advice for history students trying to study and conduct research during the COVID19 pandemic?  

I am currently mid-way through Honours part-time at the University of New England. Admittedly I have found transitioning to researching and writing in the Covid-epoch difficult.  I am fortunate that a large proportion of my primary sources have been digitised, however that small amount sitting in the archives may have to wait for another project. Maintaining communication with both my supervisor and university community have been invaluable support mechanisms. These, together with setting achievable daily writing goals are keeping me on the path to getting that thesis written!  

 Where would you like to take your research next? 

This year I will be completing my honours. My research continues to focus on how we value our shared spaces – but I’m taking it back to the late-nineteenth century and exploring the experiences and responses of Sydneysiders who spent leisure time in the parks and bush land of the city’s southern fringes. 

Photo supplied by Mark Pashley-Partridge 

Mark Pashley-Partridge is the author of “Silence in Australian Folkore: The 1804 Escape Attempt From Castle Hill and Why the Irish are Silent“, recently published in Volume 7, Number 1 of History in the Making.

To kick-off the beginning of our 2020 ‘author in focus’ series, Mark reflects on his research, his creative processes, his experiences of the peer review process and provides some timely advice for history students conducting research during the COVID19 pandemic.

How did you come to the topic for your History in the Making article?

Ever since primary school I have been interested in Australian colonial history influenced by a trip to Old Sydney Town and after watching Against The Wind. I was aware of the 1804 Castle Hill rebellion but did not understand the full magnitude of the event until further reading revealed that this was the first example of an organised armed rebellion in the colony; the first example of martial law being instigated and many other firsts. What surprised me was the lack of commemoration of such a monumental event in Australian culture.

I have always been drawn to the subaltern view of history, the “history from below” view, and sought to explain the silence linked with this event. It was my wife that mentioned the Irish folk tradition of memory in song which resulted in me diving down the rabbit hole of silences in folk tradition – thanks Kate.

What’s your writing process?

Structure is extremely important with a clear indication of submission dates. I utilise a whiteboard as a visual aid to keep me on track with the fundamental question I am attempting to answer. Research is critical and it is important to leave myself sufficient time to find and read all necessary sources. I only commence a rough structure after reading all available source material before I commence writing. Once I start writing I force myself to write every night (I was working full-time during my postgraduate studies so discipline was essential).

What did you learn from the peer review process?

It is always an apprehensive feeling opening your work to potential criticism by academics rather than simply submitting a paper for grading but it was an interesting experience to receive the feedback from others that did not know you or your work prior to the review process. Fresh eyes can surely only be a positive process as the researcher is sometimes too close to the work they have completed. The peer review feedback was supportive of my overall thesis and it was encouraging to receive some fantastic guidance to improve the quality of my paper. I wish I had this level of feedback before submitting this paper for grading.

What advice would you give to someone considering submitting an article to History in the Making?

As a budding historian you need to be passionate about your work. History is about challenging the established views in order to expand our thinking and this best way to open your work up to academia is to seek publication of your paper. Do not take any peer review comments personally and treat the process as a means of professional development on your course to becoming an historian in your chosen field. The team at HITM have been great throughout the process so overall it has been an enjoyable experience.

Do you have any advice for history students trying to study and conduct research during the COVID-19 pandemic?

I graduated from my Master of History in June 2019 prior to the madness that is COVID-19 but I studied via the University of New England as an external student. As such, my mode of study was predominantly online. The online mode of study required discipline and the ability to prioritise with often conflicting assessment dates. My research did require a few days at the Mitchell Library, Sydney enjoying delving into primary sources. This would be difficult in the present circumstances but thankfully the majority of libraries have now digitised a large portion of their primary source material making it possible to conduct your research online. I think resilience and persistence are the key to conducting research at the moment.

Where would you like to take your research next?

I have been asked this question a lot since I have graduated. My goal when I enrolled in my Master’s was to write a research paper that added to the historiography of Australian colonial studies and to have that research paper published. After working full-time and taking 3.5 years to complete my award it’s time for a well-deserved break before I determine whether there is a PhD in me. I think my wife would kill me as it is her turn to study next.

Image: US and Soviet tanks face one another at Checkpoint Charlie, October 1961 (source: http://diplomacy.state.gov/berlinwall/www/archive/IMG022.html)

The time is vivid in my memory when 1989 was not a subject of ‘history’. Born though I may have been just days after the Berlin Wall fell, in the television, newspapers and overheard conversations of my youth ‘the Cold War’ forever felt and sounded like the very foundation of the adult world I would inhabit. So entrenched such an impression can be, it takes nothing less than a revolution in perspective to remove it from the realm of memory and transfer it into that of ‘history proper’. Perhaps this is why reading Tony Judt’s 2005 tome Postwar was at once an eye-opening and a disorienting experience.

The book, naturally enough, opens with the uncompromising defeat of Nazi Germany. Never have I read a more distressing or overwhelming account of the forced people movements of the late 1940s, of the rape and thievery of the conquering soldiers, and of the arbitrary incarceration and disappearance of so many thousands of political ‘undesirables’. In terms of consequence, Judt claims, the chief European legacy of Hitler is not one of memory, but of demography. Between the Führer and his opposite number in Moscow, the Europe of 1939-1950 witnessed an unprecedented series of mass resettlements across its many lands, generating an incomparable system of national ethnic homogeneity. And it is as a collective of nations that the Europe of Postwar begins its post-1945 trajectory. What follows is a sweeping chronicle, documenting every landmark (Marshall Plan, Iron Curtain, Brezhnev Doctrine, 1956, 1968, 1989, Messina, Maastricht, Kosovo…) from above and from below.

Being so ambitious in scope, the book necessarily sacrifices detail. However, owing for the most part to Judt’s mastery of events, this is often unproblematic. Post-war educational reform and the emergence of intricate eastern police states are two developments which could have warranted individual sections, but this is not of tremendous consequence. And indeed despite Postwar’s scope, it is by no means devoid of characters, from the Neronian megalomaniac Ceausescu to the frustratingly anachronistic Iberian dictators Franco and Salazar, and from the inflexible Mrs. Thatcher to the chillingly disconnected apparatchik Walter Ulbricht. No seminal figure passes by unremarked; likewise none outstays his or her welcome. Methodologically, Judt avows no ‘Olympian detachment’ from that which he documents, and yet rarely does this translate into naked moralising. Similarly, his professed renunciation of any ‘all-embracing story’ for Europe is impeccably translated into practice. We know what comes next, of course, but (and this is the secret of truly exceptional history writing) not once does it seem inevitable. Given that the entire context of Postwar is backgrounded by a bipolar ideological struggle of which there would ultimately be but one winner, this is a truly astonishing accomplishment. An equally remarkable accomplishment is Judt’s effortless ability to thematise his subject matter. Leaping from Baltic to Balkans and Madrid to Moscow, Judt finds his threads and follows them, drawing parallels and contrasts between states and societies which, superficially viewed, share absolutely nothing in common save a desperate unwillingness to look back into the past.

By the time you reach Postwar’s end (a chilling but apposite appendiced essay entitled ‘From the House of the Dead’), the history you thought you know seems very strange and alien indeed. And this is not an impression gleaned merely from the words on the page. Going back to the television and newspapers of the time (as I immediately did), it becomes ever more transparent that the world has since shifted sufficiently for the demise of the Cold War to look and feel like a bygone age. Captured in pictures, as no seismic event before it, we see Ceausescu face his resentful crowd, recoiling in confusion, then anger, then fear; we see John Paul II greeting Lech Wałęsa; we see Yeltsin, Havel, Reagan, Thatcher, Mitterrand and Kohl seizing (or, at least, pretending to seize) their moments; and, of course, we see thousands of Germans rejoicing at the Brandenburg Gate, tempered by their surprisingly but characteristically prosaic orderliness.

Yet while we may recognise post-war Europe as a series of moments, it remains difficult in Postwar not to find oneself traversing traditional narratives; principally the decline of communism and the rise of Europe. The period succeeds in waves of generations, each epoch engendering its own dynamic. In politics, we see the failure of communism set in early, delayed only by a gerontocracy of Stalinists and apparatchiks, like their Moscow forebears at the corpse of their celebrated Leader, too petrified to look closer. The reformers succeed the Stalinists, the hardliners the reformers, and the new reformers the hardliners. Meanwhile, the west witnesses its Keynesian consensus self-destruct and dissipate in the face of the Friedmanian radicals. On each side of the Iron Curtain we observe the emergence of a youth culture, replaced in turn by youth cultures and (even if Judt enters only into minimal detail) subcultures. Meanwhile, the discredited Old Left departs for the elusive and soon-effete ‘New Left’, leaving behind a vacant intelligentsia disgraced initially by its former Stalinist obduracy and finally by its own pretensions. By the book’s end, the free-market consensus stands monolithic, Judt lamenting the desolation of originality in contemporary European politics. However, in one critical respect it is the passing of ideology for the idea of ‘Europe’ that provides Judt with his ultimate optimism. For, if there was ever any doubt that communism’s downfall and Europe’s rise are the stories undergirding his narrative, their seamless convergence in 1989 makes everything clear. ‘The opposite of Communism was not ‘capitalism’’, writes Judt, ‘but ‘Europe’’.

‘Europe’ had emerged from 1945 not as a geographic space or even an economic unit, but as an idea. That it was the longing for this idea underpinning the protest culture of eastern Europe is certainly a novel view, and one by no means conventional in the historical eyes of the West. But as Europe today remains inveterately fixed in another phase of disenchantment, it is striking that the most vociferous and articulate defenders of ‘Europe’ remain either the spokesmen of generations past or citizens of the former East. The future of Europe, it seems, remains inextricably linked to its past. Populism and nationalism may resurface in ugly spurts, but optimism and a shared sense of duty remain the necessary bulwarks against ‘Europe’ simply becoming a byword for decadence and retrogressive bureaucratism. Postwar, then, conveys above all a sense of urgency; an urgency made incarnate by the author’s untimely death in 2010. A quick survey of Europe today gives the sobering impression that the generation of 1989 has all but passed (Václav Havel – the closest Postwar comes to a conventional narrative hero – died just 16 months after Judt), and with them the decisive hopefulness they embodied. As a lived experience now receding into a bygone, analogue age, the Cold War in Europe will need its chroniclers. The greatest challenge they may initially face, however, is to escape from the shadow of this magisterial work.

– Marcus Colla