European History

A spectre is haunting Europe…

April 30, 2012

By Dr Valerie Deacon No, this isn’t the beginning of Marx and Engels’ Communist Manifesto, though that spectre (of Communism) has played just as important a role as this one in twentieth century European history. Today’s spectre is the spectre of fascism and it is not only haunting Europe, but has also infected North America. [...]

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Parliament Can Offer History More Than Just Legislation

February 22, 2012

“It’s a difficult thing to live in a country that has erased your past.” – Teju Cole, Open City Amnesty International is concerned about a new French law that would “…[make] it a criminal offense to publicly question events labeled ‘genocide’…”. The bill cleared the upper house of the French Parliament on 23 January 2012 [...]

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Boston IRA Tapes in the Courts

January 30, 2012

Northern Ireland experienced three decades of violent conflict until the signing of the Good Friday Agreement in 1998. Many of perpetrators never faced justice and some of these individuals have been brought into the political system as a part of the peace deal. This past creates multiple tensions in the present and leaves significant questions [...]

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Eating it up: historical perspectives, popular media, and food culture

January 23, 2012

Jamie Oliver has made a name for himself as a celebrity chef who has sought to improve the way we eat.  Whether it be his instructional cooking or his fight to reform school cafeterias, Oliver has spent over a decade teaching us how to make food, and urging us to think more about it. Some [...]

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Bill C-309, Preventing Persons from Concealing Their Identity during Riots and Unlawful Assemblies Act

December 12, 2011

My Conservative MP sent the following question to his constituents this week: “Debate has now begun on [Conservative] MP Blake Richards’ Private Members’ Bill C-309.  The Bill proposes creating a new criminal offence for those that wear ‘a mask or other disguise to conceal their identity without lawful excuse’ during a riot or unlawful assembly. [...]

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From Black Tuesday to Black Friday to Everyday

December 7, 2011

Discussing money is generally afforded the same privacy as the balance of one’s bank account. Inviting an open conversation about the subject in public, from basic finance to complex economics, is thought to be rude and even poorer politics. It is perhaps the most polarizing field of contemporary journalism because it has absolutely no means [...]

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Family Ties: The Successes and Challenges of Genealogical Research

October 17, 2011

Trees are a common symbol for genealogy.  Like lines of ancestry, trees contain many branches that are united through a common trunk but grow in their own direction.  And like family history, we often only see the complexity of their roots when we start digging. In a previous post, I outlined strategies on conducting the research [...]

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H-Net and Current Events

September 6, 2011

Last Wednesday I posted an essay by Dr. Patricia Daley that I first read on an H-Net Listserv, H- Urban. This is one of the hundreds of free email lists facilitated by the H-Net organization. Long before academic blogs, websites, and Twitter accounts, these H-Net lists were a key form of electronic communication among academic [...]

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My time in Hackney: Implications for youth

August 31, 2011

By Patricia Daley. [This article has already been posted on Pambazuka.org, OpenDemocracy.net and shared through the H-Urban email list. It was licenced on Pambazuka under Creative Commons, so we are reposting the full article here] I spent my teenage years on the Pembury Estate in Hackney – one of the locations of last week’s riots [...]

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Podcast: An Environmental History of the Lower Lea River Valley, Site of the 2012 London Olympics

July 28, 2011

In this talk, Jim Clifford explored some of the findings of his PhD dissertation on the environmental problems created by half a century of urban-industrial development along the Lower Lea River Valley, and the challenges this history poses for redevelopment for the 2012 London Olympics.

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