Family History, Historical Consciousness and Citizenship: A New Social History

Description

Family history is one of the most widely practiced forms of public history around the globe, especially in settler migrant nations like Australia and Canada. It empowers millions of researchers, linking the past to the present in powerful ways, transforming individuals' understandings of themselves and the world. This book examines the practice, meanings and impact of undertaking family history research for individuals and society more broadly. In this ground-breaking new book, Tanya Evans shows how family history fosters inter-generational and cross-cultural, religious and ethnic knowledge, how it shapes historical empathy and consciousness and combats social exclusion, producing active citizens. Evans draws on her extensive research on family history, including survey data, oral history interviews and focus groups undertaken with family historians in Australia, England and Canada collected since 2016. Family History, Historical Consciousness and Citizenship reveals that family historians collect and analyse varied historical sources, including oral testimony, archival documents, pictures and objects of material culture. This book reveals how people are thinking historically outside academia, what historical skills they are using to produce historical knowledge, what knowledge is being produced and what impact that can have on them, their communities and scholars. The result is a necessary revival of the current perceptions of family history.

Tanya Evans is Associate Professor and Director of the Centre for Applied History at Macquarie University, Australia, where she teaches public history and modern history.

Engaging with how family historians think, feel, collaborate and use the past in the present, Evans demonstrates the value of historical consciousness as a way of engaging with the world, and what such a perspective offers academic historians and the public alike. A remarkable achievement. * Katie Barclay, Associate Professor of History, The University of Adelaide, Australia * Tanya Evans is one of the world's leading experts in family history and her new compelling new work situates research in this field at the meeting point of multiple exciting areas. Thoughtful, suggestive, generous and provocative though it is for scholars, most importantly Family History, Historical Consciousness and Citizenship allows the family historians themselves to speak. * Jerome de Groot, Professor of Literature and Culture, Department of English, American Studies and Creative Writing, University of Manchester, UK * A fascinating book showing the often under-rated value of family history and family historians. Evans shows how family history epitomises the history from below approach, is key to understanding everyday, emotional, intimate historical worlds, and can be a radicalising force today, challenging inequalities, marginalisation and heteronormative visions of family life. * Laura King, Associate Professor in Modern British History, University of Leeds, UK * A bold, brilliant manifesto for family history, a truly democratised history whose millions of practitioners uncover for themselves the mythic nature of dominant national stories about the past. Evans powerfully argues that academics collaborate with family historians to innovate, to communicate the value of History, and to create active, global citizens. * Joanne Begiato, Professor in History, Oxford Brookes University, UK *