Books & ideas

Digging Up Cataclysms

Boris Valentin — 2024-11-14T07:32:01Z

A new archaeology has emerged whose contributions to our understanding of twentieth-century mass violence oscillate between history and memory. A specialist in the field provides an impressive overview that sounds very much like a plea.

An American Jewish Resistance during World War II

Laura Hobson Faure — 2016-07-04T07:00:00Z

Against the widespread idea that the American population remained indifferent to the genocide of European Jews, Catherine Collomp traces the history of the Jewish Labor Committee (JLC) and its action to raise awareness on Nazism, but also to save many Jewish lives in France and Poland.

The Importance of Global History

Sébastien Rozeaux — 2016-05-23T07:00:00Z

“What is the use of history?”, Serge Gruzinski answers the question with a plea for global history as an antidote to methodological nationalism and a self-complacent Eurocentrism. Global history offers another perspective on globalisation.

The Trouble with “Truth”

Ekaterina Pravilova — 2015-11-05T08:00:00Z

In Russia, the government's propaganda machine is not limited to
the political sphere. In rewriting the country's history, it is promoting “the decay of rationality and the de-installation of a scientific worldview”. Historian Ekaterina Pravilova addresses the effects of this crisis of knowledge for Russia's intelligentsia and academic community.

The Ministry of Memory

Valentin Behr — 2014-11-27T09:00:00Z

In order to tell the history of the communist period, Poland created a mechanism that is uniquely Eastern European: an Institute of National Remembrance, which combines legal investigations with scholarly research. Though it was created for political reasons, the Institute has become a fixture of Poland's academic and historiographical landscape.

Pieces of History

Pierre Savy — 2014-11-20T09:00:00Z

In his last published essay, Jacques Le Goff, who recently passed away, examines the problem of historical periodization. He defends the idea of a “long Middle Ages” and refuses to see the Renaissance as a distinct period in its own right. His book is a reflection on our chronological frameworks.

Global Thinking

Emile Chabal — 2014-10-13T08:30:00Z

Intellectual history and global history have both experienced a welcome revival in recent years, but is there a way to reconcile these two (re)emerging trends? This collection of essays offers a stimulating guide for future research, as well as some salutary warnings about the limitations of a global approach.

History in the Making

Cristelle Terroni — 2014-08-11T07:00:00Z

Books&Ideas presents a second summer selection, in which contemporary historians tell us about the future of history as a discipline, about how they research and write history, and the way history affects their bodies and minds.

When History Flows Through Us

Ivan Jablonka — 2014-06-12T07:47:32Z

Bodies that are excluded, ill, damaged: this is often the first glimpse that a historian gets of men and women in the past. Philippe Artières talks about the physical and emotional experience that this creates: “Their history flows through my body.” The writing of history is influenced by other people's suffering, but also by our own.

On Board The Slave Ship

Ivan Jablonka — 2013-12-12T08:00:00Z

The slave ship was a central institution of slave trade and slavery, as well as a place of extreme violence and suffering. Its ghost still haunts America today through the persistence of racism and inequalities.