Cirrus@Austlit

'This is a book that practicing historians are sure to enjoy and that all writers of biography should read. Its twelve chapters cover the practice of autobiography, biographical introductions to Australian and Canadian “national” historians and to Australian female historians; it also includes research on the personal networks that bound the history departments of Australian universities up to the 1980s, those of American female historians in the interwar years, and the origins of that great national resource, the Australian Dictionary of Biography. There are also two chapters on British historians that offer insights into the intellectual histories of their eras, although Raphael Samuel's great contribution was to educational practice through the influential History Workshop Journal. If this seems a strange combination it is a product of the book's origins in an Australian National University workshop in 2015 which resulted in participants then contributing their papers to this edited collection.'  (Introduction)