Journey to a Hanging: The Events that Set New Zealand Race Relations Back by a Century Peter Wells Vintage, $45.00 ISBN 9781775533900 As a child, I owned a Webster’s Illustrated Dictionary. My brother had bought it in mail-order instalments over…
Bligh: William Bligh in the South Seas Anne Salmond Viking, $65.00, ISBN 9780670075560 One of the prefaces in the late Greg Dening’s Mr Bligh’s Bad Language: Passion, Power and Theatre on the Bounty (1992) is written at the “bicentenary…
Stories without End: Essays 1975-2010 Judith Binney Bridget Williams Books, $49.99, ISBN 9781877242472 Since reading Stories without End, a collection of Judith Binney’s essays, I’ve been talking with fellow historians about the collected works of other New Zealand historians.…
Historical Frictions: Maori Claims and Reinvented Histories Michael Belgrave Auckland University Press, $44.99, ISBN 1869403207 It used to be a lonely business being a New Zealand historian. There have been plenty of us around for the last 30 years, but…
Frontier of Dreams: The Story of New Zealand ed Bronwyn Dalley and Gavin McLean TVNZ/Hodder Moa, $79.95, ISBN 1869710061 “Another damned, thick, square, book!” We’ve all heard the story about those words spoken by a doltish Duke of Gloucester upon…
The Waitangi Tribunal/Te Roopu Whakamana i te Tiriti o Waitangi ed Janine Hayward and Nicola R Wheen Bridget Williams Books, $49.95, ISBN 1877242322 State Authority, Indigenous Autonomy: Crown-Maori Relations in New Zealand/Aotearoa 1900–1950 Richard S Hill Victoria University Press, $39.95,…
Society and Politics: New Zealand Social Policy Grant Duncan Pearson Sprint Print Prentice Hall, $29.95, ISBN 1877258962 Past Judgement: Social Policy in New Zealand History ed Bronwyn Dalley and Margaret Tennant University of Otago Press, $39.95, ISBN 187727657X Greed, blame,…
Captured by Maori: White Female Captives, Sex and Racism on the Nineteenth-century New Zealand Frontier Trevor Bentley Penguin, $35.00, ISBN 0143019236 Nineteenth-century writers of broadsheets would have had a field day with the title and cover of Trevor Bentley’s new…
Going Public: the Changing Face of New Zealand History ed Bronwyn Dalley and Jock Phillips Auckland University Press, $39.95, ISBN 186940226X If I were an insecure sort of chap, I might be worried about what I actually do for a…