Making connections between the public and historians
Just a few days before Sunday, May 7th, France’s second round of the presidential elections, it has become imperative to comprehend what the election of Madame Marine Le Pen as the 11th president of the Fifth Republic would imply. Despite increasingly appealing, in recent years, to the center and the...
Unsurprisingly, the establishment of the new German–Polish border at Potsdam in 1945 had a lasting and inflammatory impact on relations between the two peoples. More profound, however, was the way in which it shaped the internal political and social development of both Poland and the emergent German Democratic Republic (GDR)....
As we have discussed before, the link between nationalism and communism has often been misconstrued by historians and social scientists alike over the past quarter century. While the two are theoretically incompatible, in practice they are often mutually dependent, and no communist state has ever been able to dispense with...
‘I think people in this country have had enough of experts’, proclaimed prominent Leave campaigner Michael Gove in a live Q&A session during the recent Brexit debate in the UK. This statement became the most notorious example of what Dominic Shellard, Vice-Chancellor of De Montfort University, criticized as the ‘pernicious...
Devastating as the Second World War undoubtedly was for the whole of Europe, virtually no country was subjected to greater or more traumatic destruction than Poland. These traumas would take decades to process fully, for the Polish state and its populace. Indeed, the war had created such an immense and...
I should mention at the outset that this isn’t going to be a standard post, but a shameless piece of self-promotion. As the title suggests, I’ve recently designed a research poster summarizing my PhD project, which I plan to exhibit at a competition at University College London this week, and...
The elimination of nationalism was one of the USSR’s main stated goals throughout its history. This commitment was largely due to the fundamental clash between communism and nationalism on a theoretical level: they were two political philosophies that should have been incompatible, if implemented in an orthodox manner. However, no...
It should be pointed out before anything else that this book is by no stretch a recent release. Banal Nationalism was first published in 1995, and the ideas that author Michael Billig raises have since been explored and built on by a variety of sociologists and historians. The following should...
The resonance of ruins: rubble discourse in the Trümmerzeit bit.ly/1KQGfC3 #German #ruin
