Scandal in the Colonies

Harvard FAS

What makes a scandal? Scandals bring hidden behaviors and unspoken assumptions into the historical record. They spark state repression, political activism and moral panics. Scandals are both a route to understanding social change and a fundamental driver of governance. In this seminar, students study a series of scandals that erupted in Australia and the British imperial world across the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Topics include imposture and fraud, frontier violence, urban…