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Full-Text Articles in Intellectual History
Labour Historians As Labour Intellectuals: Generations And Crises, Terry Irving, Sean Scalmer
Labour Historians As Labour Intellectuals: Generations And Crises, Terry Irving, Sean Scalmer
Terry Irving
Over the last nine decades Australian labour historians have been engaged in a massive, ongoing, fractious, collective intellectual project. This chapter argues that labour historians should understand their role historically, as labour intellectuals, and sketches three generational moments in the history of labour history intellectuals. We conclude that labour history is a popular, collective, democratic, regional, and political form of history-writing.
Challenges To Labour History, Terry Irving
Challenges To Labour History, Terry Irving
Terry Irving
The decline of the labour movement in the 1980s and 1990s robbed labour history of its elan as 'history with a social purpose', and the rise of postmodernism devalued the attempt by labour historians to grasp social reality as a whole. Today there is a commonly expressed feeling that labour history is experiencing a crisis. The first three essays in this volume are historiographical; then four essays engage with the challenges posed by post-modernism and cultural theory; and finally four essays present examples of the ways in which theoretical reappraisals can shape the writing of labour history.