1 August 2018

Stephanie Forrest traces the roots of the English parliamentary system back to the early Middle Ages, exploring the unique features of a key feature of our own liberal democracy. Today, parliamentary democracy is widespread and takes many forms. In Australia, we are fortunate to have inherited a particularly old parliamentary tradition with a long tradition of stability. Unlike many modern

1 April 2016

The English Civil War is definitely not as familiar to us in Australia now as it once was. Only a few decades ago, the 17thcentury (along with the Tudors) was a core element of the typical school history course. Likewise, most undergraduate history students would not be versed in the history of the civil wars, the military dictatorship of Oliver

18 December 2015

This article first appeared in the December 2015 edition of the IPA Review: Over the course of Rome’s long history, taxation was frequently a source of outrage and grief. Indeed there is a basic lesson to be learned from Roman history, namely that people did not like paying taxes they found unjust, writes Stephanie Forrest It was winter in AD

1 December 2015

Robert Harris’ fictional trilogy provides an incisive portrait of one of history’s literary giants—Marcus Tullius Cicero—and the turbulent times in which he lived, writes Stephanie Forrest. In a note at the beginning of his latest novel, Dictator, Robert Harris describes the last decades of the Roman Republic as ‘arguably—at least until the convulsions of 1933-45—the most tumultuous era in human

2 August 2015

2015 will be a year of important historical anniversaries. First, Anzac Day next year will mark exactly 100 years since the landing at Gallipoli. The First World War featured in theNovember edition of Horizons last year, and here is a piece that IPA executive director John Roskam wrote about the significance of Anzac Day and Gallipoli from 2007. Second, according to tradition, 15 June

1 August 2015

Winston Churchill, so Boris Johnson claims in his latest book, is ‘the resounding human rebuttal to all Marxist historians who think history is the story of vast and impersonal economic forces … one man can make all the difference.’ The Churchill Factor: How One Man Made History is, at its core, founded on the idea that personality does matter. The

1 August 2015

Australia’s National Curriculum is a political exercise, write Hannah Pandel and Stephanie Forrest In his book People Puzzle, sociologist Morris Massey outlined a values development spectrum in which a person’s core beliefs and values are developed during three distinct periods of their life. The first stage is between the age of zero and seven, and is known as the ‘Imprint

17 July 2015

Undergraduate history degrees in Australia fail to teach fundamental aspects of Australia’s history and how Australian liberal democracy came to be. Instead, they offer a range of disconnected subjects on narrow themes and issues—focusing on imperialism, popular culture, film studies, and ethnic/race history. This report contains the results of a systematic review of the 739 history subjects offered across 34

1 February 2015

‘Herodotus’, Tom Holland writes, ‘is the most entertaining of historians. Indeed, he is as entertaining as anyone who has ever written—historian or not.’ A bold claim though this may be, it cannot be denied that Herodotus’ work has influenced myriad writers that have come since. His legacy has been both profound and long-lived, and continues to be felt today. As

4 November 2014

This article from the November 2014 edition of the IPA Review is by Research Scholar at the IPA, Stephanie Forrest. Until the 1970s, it was expected that Australian students should read classic literature over the course of several years at school. Since then, the classics have increasingly been pushed out of curricula, with many of them crudely dismissed by teachers as