History Matters: Selected Writings, 1970-2016

by Bill Nasson

Overview

History Matters is an eloquent selection of writings over four decades by Bill Nasson, one of South Africa’s most popular and highly respected historians. The pieces in this compendium are lively and entertaining, written with wit, humour and a finely tuned sense of irony. Chapters cover the South African War, the two world wars, cricket, District Six, schooldays and education, Hollywood and history, Mandela and other political biographies, and a great many other topics. Resembling a pudding of spicy plums, this is a perfect book for anyone interested in South Africa and its history, and in a broader appreciation of tweaking the tail of life in the past.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781776090280
Publisher:	Penguin Random House South Africa
Publication date:	09/01/2016
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	304
File size:	3 MB

About the Author

Bill Nasson was born in Cape Town where he survived schooling and the trauma of adolescence before being educated in Britain at the universities of Hull, York and Cambridge. He has held visiting fellowships at Cambridge University, the Australian National University, the University of Illinois and the University of Kent in Canterbury. He lectured in economic history and history at the University of Cape Town for many years before moving to Stellenbosch University where he is a Distinguished Professor in the Department of History. An award-winning author, his numerous book publications include the acclaimed The War for South Africa, Britannia’s Empire, Springboks on the Somme, South Africa at War, 1939–1945, and WWI and the People of South Africa. Aside from being a general editor of 1914–1918 Online, the leading international encyclopaedia of the First World War, he is an ageing life member of the Peter Cook Appreciation Society.

Table of Contents

Foreword ix

Preface xiii

A Historical Education 1

The school magazine 3

Ben Kies: A tiger of non-racism and non-collaboration, 1917-1979 7

R.O. Dudley: Teacher, educator and political dissenter, 1924-2009 11

Livingstone I presume, but not that Doctor: A school memoir, 1966-1970 15

History's surprise daffodil 25

A South African War 29

Tommy Atkins in South Africa 31

The war of Abraham Esau, 1899-1901: Martyrdom, myth and folk memory in Calvinia 43

Books 65

Coarseness, consumption and consternation in the early colonial Cape 67

Alfred Milner: Britain's busiest German import 71

Beyond a Matjiesfontein boundary 75

Not quite fair play, old chap: The complexion of cricket and sport in South Africa 78

World Wars 89

A war of South African succession? A deluded dominion and its African Great War 91

'Unbalanced emotionalism' or republican romance: The 1916 Easter Rising in South African eyes 104

A flying Springbok of wartime British skies: A.G.'Sailor' Malan 116

More Books 141

Fording the Amazon 143

What did Lard Halifax say to Lord Keynes? 147

I braai, therefore I am 152

Life beyond satnav 156

Loving that letterbox 159

Social Histories 163

'She preferred living in a cave with Harry the snake-catcher': Popular leisure and class relations in District Six, c. 19205-19505 165

Legend of the fall: The Luxurama 187

The priest, the chapel and the repentant landowner: Abraham Esau revisited 189

Historians 205

The hearse of history 207

Remembering Stanley Trapido, 1933-2008 209

Even More Books 213

On another trek too, and not where you would have expected 215

The was, the is, and the might-have-been: Political leadership in post-apartheid South Africa 218

Film 229

'A Whiteout: Malcolm X in South Africa 231

'The Deaf: Gladstone, Disraeli and a South African historian in the court of King Hollywood 235

Odds and Ends 253

Maki Saki 255

History's fractured cobblestones 263

After the book-burning 267

Wine and festivals 270

A few favourite quotes 273

Index 275