1st Edition

Knowledge Making Historians, Archives and Bureaucracy

Edited By Barbara Brookes, James Dunk Copyright 2020
170 Pages
by Routledge

170 Pages
by Routledge

170 Pages
by Routledge

Paper has been the material of bureaucracy, and paperwork performs functions of order, control, and surveillance. Knowledge Making: Historians, Archives and Bureaucracy explores how those functions transform over time, allowing private challenges to the public narratives created by institutions and governments. Paperwork and bureaucratic systems have determined what we know about the past. It... Read more

Introduction: Bureaucracy, archive files, and the making of knowledge

Barbara Brookes and James Dunk

1. Asylum case records: fact and fiction

Sally Swartz

2. Bookkeeping madness. Archives and filing between court and ward

Volker Hess

3. Work, paperwork and the imaginary Tarban Creek Lunatic Asylum, 1846

James Dunk

4. Papering over madness: accountability and resistance in colonial asylum files: a New Zealand case study

Barbara Brookes

5. Paper Soldiers: the life, death and reincarnation of nineteenth-century military files across the British Empire

Charlotte Macdonald and Rebecca Lenihan

6. Red ink, blue ink, blood and tears? War records and nation-making in Australia and New Zealand

Kathryn Hunter

7. A tale of two bureaucracies: asylum and lunacy law paperwork

James Moran

Biography

Barbara Brookes is Professor of History at the University of Otago, Dunedin, New Zealand. Her research interests lie in medical and gender history. Her award-winning A History of New Zealand Women, Bridget Williams Books, was published in 2016. She is currently working on a biography of Anna Longshore Potts MD.

James Dunk is a historian of medicine and science at the University of Sydney, Australia, and is working on psychological and public health responses to global environmental change. His history of madness in colonial Australia, Bedlam at Botany Bay, was published by NewSouth in 2019 and shortlisted for the Ernest Scott Prize.