Category Archives: European History

Canadian Historical Association: Open Letter to the Polish Prime Minister

December 7, 2016 2 Comments

Yesterday, Joan Sangster, the President of the Canadian Historical Association sent the following letter to Polish Prime Minister Beata Szydlo regarding recent legislation criminalizing historical interpretation. For broader context of this issue see Jim Clifford’s post The Polish Government, the Holocaust and Jan Grabowski and Thomas Peace’s Fake News, Global History Wars, and the Importance of Historical Thinking. Ottawa, December… Read more »

After the Wall: Nostalgia and Cynicism during the German “Honeymoon,” 1989-1992

November 18, 2016 No Comments

Alban Bargain-Villéger Twenty-seven years ago, on November 9, 1989, the Berlin Wall collapsed. Twenty-seven is an odd number, so why write a post on this particular topic now, on the occasion of a not-so-symbolic anniversary? One reason is that I had always wanted to write something on the couple of years that followed the Fall of the Wall. But mainly,… Read more »

Travels with Caroline

September 23, 2016 2 Comments

Alban Bargain-Villéger Unlike my previous contributions, this post is the result of an accident. While browsing the contents of my external hard drive in June during a (late) spring cleaning operation, I found a folder labelled “Caroline.” Intrigued, I opened the file and immediately remembered what these forgotten documents were. In the summer of 2008, while on vacation at my… Read more »

History on TV: Political Drama in the 2010s

May 19, 2016 No Comments

Alban Bargain-Villéger In recent years, serial political dramas such as House of Cards and the Danish series Borgen have enjoyed quite a bit of success in North America. Although one might argue that the genre is more of a child of the 1990s, since the original House of Cards trilogy (set in a fictional post-Thatcher Britain) came out in 1991,… Read more »

21st Century Terrorism: Nothing New?

March 17, 2016 2 Comments

Alban Bargain-Villéger About a month after the November 13 shootings, I was lining up, along with hundreds of carefree visitors, in front of the Osiris exhibit at Paris’s Arab World Institute. The sun was out, children were playing on the steps of the building and, aside from the occasional military squad patrolling the area, it was hard to believe that… Read more »

Film Friday: Suffrage Stories Without Class

March 11, 2016 3 Comments

Joan Sangster A friend who teaches the history of feminism in Canada recently relayed her students’ responses to the British movie Suffragette. Many found the women heroic, the film “moving” and uplifting. They then described their image of Canadian suffragists: narrow-minded, “classist” and racist, not very radical, hardly inspiring role models. Their negative image of early Canadian feminists does not… Read more »

Pork Cuts: The Sharp Edges of Nativism in Southern Europe

December 14, 2015 2 Comments

By Aitana Guia Too many political leaders are banking on politicizing migration today. Culture has become a fertile battlefield. Food represents familiarity and safety. Eating is a daily activity that connects parents to their children, to their schools, and to their extended families. Social life in Southern Europe revolves around food and food rituals. Donna Gabbacia, a historian of the… Read more »

The European Extreme Right Yesterday and Today

November 24, 2015 1 Comment

Alban Bargain-Villéger Studies on the European ultra-nationalist right are not exactly rare. Over the last couple of decades, many a tree has been felled and much ink has been spilled on the extreme right in our day and age and its connections (or lack thereof) with the fascist movements and parties of old. But despite the abundance of works on… Read more »

History for Children? Watching “Once Upon a Time… Man” as an Adult in the 21st Century

September 3, 2015 2 Comments

By Alban Bargain-Villéger On a hot July night, while in the throes of insomnia, I found myself waxing nostalgic and decided to revisit my favourite childhood animated series. After watching a few episodes of Cobra and The Mysterious Cities of Gold (also fascinating animation series in their own right) I realized that Once Upon a Time… Man (Il était une… Read more »

Remote Silvertown Transforms Again

August 10, 2015 No Comments

By Jim Clifford Industrial Silvertown is not a standard tourist attraction in London, though in recent years thousands of people have peered down on the remaining factories from the Emirates Air Line cable cars as they descend toward Victoria Dock and the ExCel convention centre. It was nonetheless a really important region of heavy industrial development during the late nineteenth century and… Read more »

Last »