Making Sense of History

About the Book

Much more is known about the past that is interesting, valuable and and relevant to our problems than any one of us can ever know. Making Sense of History proposes we focus on Five Zones of Priority: Livelihoods, Protection from violence, Freedom, Relationships, and Ideas. Partington examines some perennial problems, such as Progress or Regression, Bias, Prejudice and Moral Judgment, Depth versus Breadth and the ongoing fabrication of myths, and accusations of genocide and cannibalism. Partington warns against looking to history for the certainties that physics or mathematics provide. We have free will and make decisions rather than react uniformly to external forces. Historical understanding is more like proverbial wisdom writ large than the theorems of Pythagoras or Einstein. A more serious problem is the ideological capture of much history teaching in countries like Britain, the United States, Canada, Australia and New Zealand. Partington does not advocate vainglorious national pride but defends the achievement of those countries in making a better, though imperfect, balance between freedom and security than has been made at almost every other time or place.

About the Author

Partington was born in 1930 in Middleton, a mill town close to Manchester. His father was a cotton spinner and my mother came from a coal-mining family. He attended council schools and was the first child from Boarshaw Primary School to win a scholarship to Queen Elizabeth’s School, Middleton. He was a Sunday school teacher in the Temple Street Baptist Church a youthful lay preacher and ardent socialist.. In 1948 he won a bursary to Bristol University to read History There he gained colours in football and was awarded Upper Second Honours in History. After National Service in the Royal Air Force, he taught history in Glendale Grammar School, Wood Green, and then Twyford Comprehensive School, Acton. He became a senior lecturer in history and history of education in Doncaster and Coventry Colleges of Education, headmaster of Bungay Modern School in Suffolk and an Education Officer in the London Borough of Waltham Forest During his classroom years he was very active politically. He was elected President of the Middlesex Country Association of the National Union of Teachers and National Secretary of the Teachers’ Committee for Nuclear Disarmament. He only returned to serious scholarship after disillusionment with political activism. He served on Examining Boards in History and added to his qualifications an Honours degree in Sociology and Economics and the Academic Diploma in Education of London University and Master of Education of Bristol University In 1976 his pioneering Women Teachers in England and Wales in the Twentieth Century, was published by the National Foundation for Educational Research, In 1976 his Australian-born wife, their two children and he emigrated to Adelaide, where he taught for nineteen years in Flinders University and then two years in the University of the South Pacific in Fiji. In Australia He has written eleven books and numerous articles. He was awarded PhD by the University of Adelaide and commissioned to report on teacher education in Britain and New Zealand. He was a member of the South Australian Experts’ Consultative Committee on the State Constitution in 1998 and the Canberra History Summit of 2006.