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Post Archive

Category: PhD Journal

  • 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…

  • 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…

  • 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…

  • 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…