Keith Windschuttle

According to the author, history in the late twentieth century is in the clutches of literary and social theorists who have little respect for or training in the discipline. The author believes that they deny the existence of truth and substitute radically chic theorizing for real knowledge about the past. The result is revolutionary and unprecedented: contemporary historians are increasingly obscuring the facts on which truth about the past is built. In this book, the author offers an exposé of these developments.

How Literary Critics and Social Theorists are Murdering Our Past

The Killing of History

Elizabeth Elliott

The discipline of communications is a prominent factor in today's business environment. More than ever before, the way in which we communicate clearly reflects new directions in social, vocational and organisational life. The third edition of Writing, Researching, Communicating: Communication Skills for the Information Age, expands upon the dramatic changes in communications which have taken place through the final decade of the 20th century, and poses significant developments for the 21st century. A well-balanced approach to both theory and practice is continued in this third edition. Throughout each newly expanded chapter, practices and skills are both immediately relevant and consistently derived from a coherent, up-to-date theory of communications and its role in society. Focusing on the need to dissipate many of the myths that surround communications practice, Writing, Researching, Communicating, assists students and teachers in developing the kinds of communications skills that are in demand today, and necessary for the future.New to this edition. The third edition of Writing, Researching, Communicating has four completely new chapters. These are: chapter 5: Document Design, chapter 12: References & Bibliography, chapter 22: Writing for Broadcasting, and chapter 23: Media Law. In addition to these new chapters, the most current developments in electronic and digital technology have been updated, with a completely rewritten chapter entitled The Revolution in Communication Technology.

Communication Skills for the Information Age

Writing, Researching, Communicating

"For 2,500 years, since the time of Herodotus and Thucydides, historians have sought to record the truth about the past. Today, however, the discipline is suffering a potentially lethal attach from the rise to prominence of an array of French-inspired literary and social theories, each of which denies that truth and knowledge about the past are possible. These theories claim the central point on which history was founded no longer holds: there is no fundamental distinction between history and myth or between history and fiction." "Historians in classrooms from Berkeley to Paris have embraced these views, and an increasing number of literary critics and social theorists now feel free to define their own work as history and to call themselves historians. The result is revolutionary: historians have not only changed how history is taught, they are also increasingly obscuring the very facts on which the truth must be built. In The Killing of History, Keith Windschuttle offers both a devastating expose of the absurdity of these developments and a defense of the integrity of Western intellectual traditions which are now so widely attacked." "Windschuttle examines exactly what is being taught about Columbus' discovery of the New World; the history of asylums and prisons in Europe; the fall of Communism in 1989; and the Battle of Quebec in 1759. He offers a much needed defense of traditional history as a properly scientific endeavor and argues that the great works of history should still be regarded as among the finest forms of Western literature."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved

Argues against the widely held belief that in the 20th century up to one in three Aboriginal children were forcibly removed from their parents in order to put an end to Aboriginality. In 1997, the Human Rights Commission made the most notorious accusation ever directed against Australia. It accused this country of committing genocide against the Aborigines by stealing their children. The purported intention of governments and welfare officials was to institutionalise and assimilate the children into white society and thus rid Australia of its Aboriginal people. In 2008, Prime Minister Kevin Rudd apologised to Aboriginal people for these policies. This book is based on an exhaustive examination of the archival records of child removals and of government policies and laws. It also scrutinizes the work of the historians on whom the Human Rights Commission relied. It finds the historical research that created this interpretation was shoddy and untrustworthy. Aboriginal children were never removed from their families in order to put an end to Aboriginality or, indeed, for any improper government policy or program. The small numbers of Aboriginal child removals in the twentieth century were almost all based on traditional grounds of child welfare. Most children affected had been orphaned, abandoned, destitute, neglected, malnourished or subject to various forms of domestic violence, sexual exploitation and sexual abuse. The notion that this amounted to genocide came from creative interpretations of selected evidence taken out of context by politically motivated historians. There were no Stolen Generations. NB: Volume Three is published out of sequence. Volume Two and Volume Four will be published later.

Keith Windschuttle

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