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Cultural Memory and the Finnish Civil War
by Tiia Sahrakorpi “Why are Finnish people constantly discussing World War II?” The Second World War is brought up by many elderly Finns in interviews concerning Russia’s actions today in relation to Finland. World War II still forms an important part of Finnish cultural memory and self-identification. However, the Finnish Civil War of 1918 does not have…
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Reorienting the Home Front: Spatial History and Collective Memory
By Clemency Hinton (@clemencyhinton) Does the past sometimes feel ‘far away’? Can we ever ‘go back’? And ‘where’ did we come from? These questions demonstrate that we often conceptualise and speak about history in spatial terms. That is, we describe the past as a place. History has famously been called a ‘foreign country’. Perhaps the…
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Who liberated Belgrade – and who cares who liberated Belgrade?
By Helena Trenkić (@helenakic) In 1948 Tito’s Yugoslavia was expelled from the alliance of Marxist-Leninist parties known as Cominform. In the aftermath of the Tito-Stalin split, the narrative of who liberated Yugoslavia at the end of the Second World War – and in particular who liberated the capital, Belgrade – became hotly-contested history.
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Oddments of Imperium: St. Mark’s of Bangalore
By David Martin (Bluesky: @davidmartin8293.bsky.social Substack: @davidmartin8293 A cathedral, the seat of a bishop, is normally an august building. From the gargoyle-studded Notre Dame de Paris to the bird-woman-spotted St. Paul’s of London, monuments that bear this name are meant to represent an ancient genealogy of European Christendom. But what happens when said Christendom arrives…
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Imagining Jewish Topographies in Occupied City
By Sietske van der Veen ( Twitter/X: @SBvanderVeen; Bluesky: @sbvanderveen.bsky.social) The documentary Occupied City (De bezette stad,2023) contrasts everyday life in Amsterdam’s cityscape today, visualised in the moving images, with the horrors of World War II, described by the voice-over. Through this layering in sound and vision, the 4.5-hour film made by Steve McQueen and…
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