Europe Solidaire Sans Frontières
Biography is among the canonical genres of historical writing. It is also one particularly riddled with clichés: too often authors put their protagonists on a pedestal instead of providing a complex, nuanced picture of them as personalities and historical actors. In response to this, recent (...)
We present a review of the Hungarian-language debate organised on Mérce portal, connecting assessments of today’s anti-racist mobilization and de-colonizing agendas with assessments of victim narratives and attempts to re-examine the relations between Eastern Europe and the West regarding history (...)
The historian Enzo Traverso, a professor at the Cornell University (USA), is one of the most distinguished specialists in memory studies. In the following pages he answers a series of questions focusing on the memory of the perpetrators and their legacies, the current rise of new far-right (...)
The removal of racist and oppressive pasts through the toppling of monuments standing in the epicentres of colonial and slave dominions, the US, UK and across Europe, has ruffled the feathers of leading conservative politicians, historians and even some ‘liberal’ thinkers and representatives, who (...)
This article is a response to some of the criticisms made of How Revolutionary were the Bourgeois Revolutions? by Gerstenberger, Post and Riley. In particular, it focuses on two issues of definition – that of capitalism and the capitalist nation-state – which arise from the book’s (...)
‘Concentration camps’ are difficult to define. Even the survivors of the most notorious and universally recognised camps in history discovered this problem in the aftermath of the Second World War.
Jewish children arrested in the 1942 Vélodrome d’Hiver Roundup in Paris. Many of them were taken (...)
The controversy around Bruce Gilley’s article “The Case for Colonialism” has drawn global attention to a stream of revisionist claims and visions on the history of colonialism that has emerged in academia and in the media in recent years. Authors such as Nigel Biggar in the UK, Niall Ferguson in (...)
The historian Enzo Traverso, a professor at the Cornell University (USA), is one of the most distinguished specialists in memory studies. In this interview he answers a series of questions focusing on the memory of the perpetrators and their legacies, the current rise of new far-right movements (...)
One of the most hyped “events” of American television, The Vietnam War, has started on the PBS network. The directors are Ken Burns and Lynn Novick. Acclaimed for his documentaries on the Civil War, the Great Depression and the history of jazz, Burns says of his Vietnam films, “They will inspire (...)
This interview was designed to highlight the differences of thought between two Marxist historians, each focused on radically different parts of the world, with one more experienced colleague and one exciting prospect for the future. In effect, I sought to highlight how differences in (...)
History and mythology both try to explain the past but while history relies on evidence, myths rely on fantasy and must be examined differently, says the scholar
The role of a public intellectual is not easy, especially when it comes to interrogating the government in power and holding it (...)
An Oxford don wants Britons to stop feeling guilty about colonialism. But evidence suggests it already inspires more pride than shame
What did we learn about the British empire at school? In my case, which is the case for a generation born just before the empire’s long collapse, nothing very (...)
As the nineteenth century neared its close, revolutionary socialists were hostile to the world’s imperial powers and to their colonial empires, which then encircled the globe. They foresaw the overthrow of colonialism as a by-product of socialist revolution in the industrialized capitalist (...)
AFTER HIS DEATH last year at the age of 82, most obituaries of Eugene Genovese — the historian of American slavery whose masterpiece, Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made, was published in 1974—stated that he traveled from left to right, from Marxism to conservatism.
While not (...)
Review: Civilisation: The West and the Rest by Niall Ferguson Allen Lane, 402 pp, £25.00, March 2011, ISBN 978 1 84614 273 4. ‘Civilisation’s going to pieces,’ Tom Buchanan, the Yale-educated millionaire, abruptly informs Nick Carraway in The Great Gatsby. ‘I’ve gotten to be a terrible pessimist (...)
This review of Chris Wickham’s Framing the Early Middle Ages situates the book within the context of his earlier writings on the transition to feudalism, and contrasts his explanation for and dating of the process with those of the two main opposing positions set out in Perry Anderson’s Passages (...)
History and Revolution: Refuting Revisionism, edited by Mike Haynes and Jim Wolfreys and published by Verso in 2007, collects essays on the English, French, and Russian Revolutions and the body of revisionist historiography — developed or publicized by historians like François Furet, Simon (...)
I owe at least two debts to Isaac Deutscher. The first is general: his personal example as a historian. Deutscher was not employed as an academic and, for at least part of his exile in Britain, had to earn his living providing instant Kremlinology for, among other publications, The Observer and (...)
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