Book review: Wilfred Prest, Kerrie Round and Carol Fort (eds), The Wakefield Companion to South Australian History

Gothard, J. (2004) Book review: Wilfred Prest, Kerrie Round and Carol Fort (eds), The Wakefield Companion to South Australian History. Australian Historical Studies, 35 (123). pp. 179-181.

Abstract

Writing in 2002, the president of the American Historical Association, Lynn Hunt, commented on the recent proliferation of encyclopedia projects, a development she suggested, of the need to '(seek) the synthesis of all that specialized knowledge scholars have produced in the last decades'. This 'boomlet', she argued, is part of historians' current concerns with taking stock and re-assessing evidence, a concern we are seeing played out in this country in the debate over the historical veracity of accounts of frontier violence. Encyclopedias represent 'a summing up of what has been accomplished rather than a forging forward'. This seemingly modest description seems a pithy summary of the achievements, and probably also the ambitions, of the Wakefield Companion...

Item Type:	Journal Article
Murdoch Affiliation(s):	School of Social Sciences and Humanities
Publisher:	Routledge, part of the Taylor & Francis Group
URI:	http://researchrepository.murdoch.edu.au/id/eprint/14396

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