Samuel D Carpenter

Post Archive

Author: nzhistorian

  • Te Rauparaha & Son.

    I’m doing some work on the correspondence and recorded speeches of Tamihana Te Rauparaha, son of Ngāti Toa rangatira, Te Rauparaha. The father has the more historical fame (or infamy)…

  • Thesis writing … and ‘the romance of the archive’

    Well it’s been some considerable time since I’ve posted. A principal reason for this is that I’ve been focussed on writing this past year, and will be for the forseeable…

  • Review of Andrew Sharp – Samuel Marsden bio

    I recently had published a review of Andrew Sharp’s significantly-proportioned appraisal of Samuel Marsden’s life and ‘opinions’: in the New Zealand Journal of History, vol 51, no 1 (2017), pp…

  • Alfred Brown’s library – Te Papa, Tauranga

    I recently spent a couple of days in the library of this important Church Missionary Society missionary in New Zealand. What I was struck by: the striking aesthetic of this nineteenth century…

  • Thomas Carlyle on … Democracy

    The enigmatic Victorian writer, Thomas Carlyle, who was inspired by German Romanticism, wrote some pretty fascinating lines on ‘democracy’ and ‘government’ in his Past and Present (1843): Democracy, which means despair…

  • Review of new Samuel Marsden biography

    My short review of Andrew Sharp’s intellectual biography of Marsden was published this week on the NZ Listener’s webpage, see here. A longer (academic) review will be published soon in the…

  • Only E P Thompson could say it like this

    From ‘In Defence of the Jury’, in E P Thompson, Making History: Writings on History and Culture (New York: New Press, 1994): … Two basic propositions of democracy are so…

  • Notes on Colonial-Imperial knowledge formation

    A number of scholars of British India have sought to understand the ways in which British power was exercised through constructing knowledge about Indian societies, including their histories and literatures,…

  • Clifford Geertz – historical anthropologist

    Every now and again one reads some truly arresting prose. I’ve been reading some the last couple of days in F Inglis, ed., Clifford Geertz: Life Among the Anthros and…

  • Just a few light reference works…

    … as I begin some focussed writing. I stripped the NZ history shelf at my local. Good times.  

  • New faith, new law

    I was in Ōtaki recently. One of the aims of my thesis is to explore the origins of the Kīngitanga on the Kāpiti coast. At Ōtaki is one of New…

  • … and more books

    It’s been a few weeks since I’ve posted. I’m still busy collecting and reading relevant historiography. Just took a photo now of the latest arrivals. I’m also starting to frame…

  • The politics of history… J G A Pocock

    I’ve been reading J G A Pocock, a New Zealander with an international reputation in the world of humanities. Initially a professor of political science at Canterbury University in the 1960s, he has become a…

  • Coffee and Colonialism

    … of course there is an important imperial or post-colonial discourse that can be written about the relationship of coffee to colonialism. Right now I’m reading Partha Chatterjee and drinking…

  • My anthropological and post-colonial turn?

    I seem to be collecting a lot of anthropological and post-colonial literature at the moment. My shelf (below) is the evidence: Bernard S Cohn, Nicholas Thomas, Ashis Nandy, Partha Chatterjee,…