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Ann McGrath

Illicit Love: Interracial sex and marriage in the United States and Australia by Ann McGrath

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April 2017, no. 390
Mark McKenna reviews 'Illicit Love: Interracial sex and marriage in the United States and Australia' by Ann McGrath

In the New England summer of 1825, the residents of Cornwall, Connecticut, built a funeral pyre in the middle of their village green. From a nearby window, nineteen-year-old Harriett Gold watched as the flames leapt into the sky, her heart consumed with ‘anguish’. Among those burning Harriett’s effigy was her brother, Stephen, who, like nearly all of the town ...

How to Write History That People Want to Read by Ann Curthoys and Ann McGrath & Voice and Vision by Stephen J. Pyne

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February 2010, no. 318
Stuart Macintyre reviews 'How to Write History That People Want to Read' by Ann Curthoys and Ann McGrath, and 'Voice and Vision: A guide to writing history and other serious nonfiction' by Stephen J. Pyne

‘Real solemn history, I cannot be interested in’, declared Jane Austen, and so too do a number of Australian publishers. It is a commonplace that historians do not know how to write, except to each other in ways that put other readers to sleep. The first advice to the author of any newly minted doctoral dissertation preparing a book proposal is to eliminate all reference to the thesis. The starting point in any of the non-fiction writing programs offered at universities is to purge their manuscript of academic diction. ‘Sadly’, Ann Curthoys and Ann McGrath begin their advice book on the subject, ‘historical writing has quite a bad reputation’.

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