Course Description
This course will introduce you to key issues in Aotearoa/New Zealand history.
We have called the course ‘Rethinking New Zealand’ because, while it is intended as an introduction to Aotearoa/New Zealand’s social, cultural, economic and political history, we also hope to challenge you to examine some of your assumptions or preconceptions about New Zealand history.
For instance, was New Zealand ‘discovered’? Was the nineteenth century a time of settlement or conquest? Was New Zealand a ‘social laboratory’, a world leader in social policy? Was New Zealand a place where rugby was always king? Was it a family paradise, the most British of all Britain’s colonies, a country of equal citizens?
Reviewing our history over the past hundred years gives us a greater sense of our own identity as a nation and of our place in the world.
A broad range of nineteenth-century and twentieth-century topics will be canvassed using interpretations that give fresh insight into our political, economic, social and cultural history.