(1) And, but for an unexpected change of rules, I would not have studied History at University either. Having selected Geography, Economics and Psychology as my preferred first year options, I remarked that I understood the Arts Faculty required students to do English. When told that this no longer applied and that the options at the University College of Townsville in 1969 were History and French, the decision was a no-brainer.
(2) circumstantial; adjective; late 16th century: from Latin circumstantia; (of evidence or a legal case) pointing indirectly toward someone's guilt but not conclusively proving it. (New Oxford American Dictionary)
Circumstantial evidence relates to a series of facts other than the particular fact sought to be proved. The party offering circumstantial evidence argues that this series of facts, by reason and experience, is so closely associated with the fact to be proved that the fact to be proved may be inferred simply from the existence of the circumstantial evidence. (https://legal-dictionary.thefreedictionary.com/circumstantial+evidence.)
(3) First year: Contemporary History 1890-1960; Second Year: Southeast Asian History, Problems in Australian History, Race Relations; Third Year: American Civil War, Indonesian Nationalism.
(4) It seems reasonable (to The Author, at least) to assume that someone with a grasp of twentieth-century history would “know” the sequence World War One > Great Depression > World War Two, and could then go on to discuss the cause and effect links between the three. The resulting hypothesis would be something like the disruption following the First World War contributed to the Great Depression which, combined with the fallout from the Treaty of Versailles, encouraged the rise of Hitler which, in turn, led to the Second World War.)
(5) At the head of the Wikipedia page on William Kidd (a.k.a. 'Captain Kidd' (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Kidd) one finds (or found, in January 2019) the following reasonably scathing assessment of the contents:
This article needs additional citations for verification. (May 2011)
This article may require cleanup to meet Wikipedia's quality standards. The specific problem is: that the article fails as encyclopedic, making repeated unsourced historical statements, and ambiguous and likewise unsourced broad concluding interpretations—in Biography section, and in lead statements (e.g., weasely "some ... deem," "there is evidence"; unsourced evaluations "acted only", "springs largely", "actual depredations", "less lucrative"; etc.) (January 2017)
This article's lead section may not adequately summarise its contents. (January 2017)
(6) i.e. Origins, Indigenes and Antecedents, Recollection, Reflection and Reminiscence and Mapping The North. Given some of the issues with methodology discussed in the next chapter, that may not be possible in the browser-formatted versions of the same text. In that format, the footnotes, necessarily, need to go at the end of the chapter.
(7) The Inquisitive Reader may not be satisfied with that amount of detail, and may want to know yet more. In that case, he or she could proceed to The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography though accessing the content there requires an account or membership of a subscribing institution like the State Library of Queensland)