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Posts tagged ‘Europe’

Nov 13

How has protest in Europe evolved?: An Interview with Dr Hanno Balz.

by Emily Redican-Bradford (efr27@cam.ac.uk) & Dr Hanno Balz (hb528@cam.ac.uk)

Emily Redican-Bradford interviews Dr Hanno Balz, who has recently joined the Faculty of History at Cambridge, having previously taught at the universities of Bremen, Lüneburg and John Hopkins. His research focuses on Modern German and European History.

Dr Balz, as part of your research, you examine the protest movements and student revolts of 1968. Does this time period represent a turning point in how protest and political cultures in Western Europe were understood, in your opinion?

Yes, I think we can say that, especially when we look at the protests as, first of all, student protests. This is the first time, after the Second World War, that the majority of the students are more liberal-minded or left-wing than the overall population. This was not the case before the war, when it was so much more elitist. In post-war societies, universities built a lot of new institutes and governments opened up the universities for working-class youth, because a new generation was needed for more demanding jobs. It was mainly training and educating white-collar workers, and that’s a change. It’s an expression of the New Left as well, and it’s also a youth movement that’s an anti-systemic movement, which ventures away from the old party structures, the labour union structures, that had had a grip on left-wing mobilization for the previous hundred years.

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Jun 19

World at their Feet: The World Cup and History

By Tom Smith  (@TomEtesonSmith)

For any football fan, and even for many who don’t usually indulge in the ‘beautiful game’, the arrival of the World Cup every four years provides pure escapism. Even in England, the disappointment of a predictable penalty shoot-out defeat is assuaged by the tournament’s association with long hot summer days, the colours and sounds of packed stadia, and the creation of iconic images on the pitch below. Simply put, the World Cup seems to exist in a vacuum which transcends any given moment in world history. This year’s tournament perhaps exemplifies this fact – at a time when tensions between Russia and ‘the West’ are at their highest since the Cold War, representatives from all over the world can gather on Russian soil to play football. Murmurings about corruption, boycotts, and hooliganism bubble under the surface, but in the build-up to kick-off excitement about the sport itself takes over, along with a shared sense that the show must go on. Read more

May 22

The Grand (Archival) Tour

By Zoe Farrell (@zoeffarrell)

One of the many advantages of being a historian who studies other countries is the ample opportunities for travel. My work focuses on artisans and material culture in sixteenth-century Verona, and I have therefore spent a lot of time in Veronese archives. However, I am also interested in how Renaissance culture travelled, especially through the Alps and into Germany. As part of a major fieldwork trip this year, I decided to follow the route of my research to Germany, visiting archives of interest along the way. In total, I visited thirteen archives in three different countries. During this time, I went from eating lunch outside in the piazzas of Italy, to walking through the snow in -14 degrees Celsius in Germany. No two archives were the same and I learnt a vast amount about research, travel, and independence. Here, I will share some of the most important things I learned. Read more

Mar 27

England’s First Double Agents?

By Fred Smith | @Fred_E_Smith

The disturbing events which have recently unfolded in the small English town of Salisbury appear to belong more to the set of a Hollywood spy thriller or the pages of an Ian Fleming novel than to reality. From a historical perspective, the role of spies and informants on all sides during both the Second World War and the Cold War is well known. However, over the last twenty years, historians have increasingly come to recognise that it was during the early modern period that ‘modern’ methods and strategies of international espionage first began to develop. Stephen Alford, for example, has shone new light on Francis Walsingham’s role as Elizabeth I’s ‘Spymaster’ – research which informed a three-part BBC series last year.[1] Similarly, a recent article by Sebastian Sobecki has uncovered the importance of an English spy, John Peyton, in providing intelligence on Spanish diplomatic activity in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth around the turn of the seventeenth century.[2] Read more

Sep 17

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The refugee crisis in Europe: should history drive the debate?

By Carys Brown @HistoryCarys

Heartbreaking stories of the thousands of refugees crossing into Europe this summer sparked widespread demands that the UK government take more action to relieve the plight of those seeking asylum. A sense that future generations will judge critically how Europe reacts to the crisis has played heavily in debates about what the UK’s response should be. Read more