Contemporary European History Research Articles

Periodisation and modernity: an introduction

ABSTRACT Dividing time into separate epochs is fundamental to historical research. However, while periodisations reflect particular interpretations of political, economic, social, and cultural developments, they often rely on the concept of ‘modernity’ as a foundation. This nexus between modernity and periodisation is well-established yet deeply problematic. Pre- or non-modern times and spaces are deemed deficient and backward, as not yet modern. This bias extends to colonial and postcolonial regions, where Western historical paradigms were imposed to interpret political and social realities. Confronting these biases unveils how historians conceptualize space and time and highlights the normative assumptions embedded within different forms of periodisation. However, simply expanding the scope or timeframes of research alone does not address the dilemma. Historians do well to historicise this nexus and develop alternative approaches to writing history. The intricate relationship between periodization and modernity forms the intellectual starting point of this special issue. Originating from dialogues between medieval and modern European history, this issue aims to critically reevaluate classical periodisation models and explore alternative paradigms. By integrating contributions from scholars of medieval, early modern, modern, and contemporary European history, this issue bridges previously separated debates, promotes a comprehensive understanding of historical temporalities and challenges established historiographical norms.

Narrative and Material Tools of Resistance: Mobilizing Textile Crafts, Heritage, and Fashion in the Context of the Invasion of Ukraine (2022–2023)

In 2022–2024, textile and fashion scholars came together to write an anthology sharing a new vision of European history as seen through textiles, in the COST Action EuroWeb. During this period, the continent was still dealing with the consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic and was then faced with Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. Contemporary European history will be markedly defined by the ongoing war in Ukraine. One remarkable aspect of this conflict is the way textiles and dress appear daily in a variety of media outlets, mobilized as visual and semiotic means to communicate issues of war and national identity, especially by Ukraine. The first material embodiment signaling Ukrainian resistance to the Russian invasion is the national blue and yellow flag. As a color-coded textile marker, in Ukraine and internationally, the flag appears at rallies in support of the nation’s efforts to defend itself. Beyond the flag, this essay offers a critical reflection on how textiles and garments are used in times of conflict as narrative tools of self-identification, to enact and express a sense of cultural belonging and resistance. Throughout history, textiles and clothes have been “auxiliary materials for weaponry as well as for protection” in the context of war. In modern history, they are also integral components of a nation’s propaganda efforts toward the local population, as well as in diplomacy and international communication. For example, leaders of the Khmer Rouge dictatorial regime in Cambodia instituted an outfit, comprised of a black cotton garb inspired by farmers working in rice fields, a red and white krama scarf, and a Chinese-style cap, to convey ideas of a uniform peasant-driven Marxist society within and outside the country. Through our daily choice of clothing, we wear a tactile manifestation of identity and values, and global citizens sympathetic to either side of the conflict can physically and materially express their political views via clothing. Textile and fashion research commonly draws from museum collections, scholarly publications, and archaeological sources. This essay also engages with multi-modal forms of personal, public, and cultural expression, such as artworks, and garments, as well as podcast interviews, social media publications, and news pieces from commercial media outlets. This diversity of sources helps us to closely document how textiles and fashion have been showcased, discussed, and reclaimed in the recent political climate. They involve a range of actors, including craft communities, activists, civilians, political personalities, and heritage experts, which illuminate the many ways of negotiating Ukraine’s current situation. In this sense, this paper does not aim to provide a comprehensive overview of Ukrainian textile cultural heritage and history, or to assess its vast diversity of regional crafts. Our perspective is not essentialist or aiming to demonstrate direct links between today and the past; rather, we observe in this paper how ‘dressing the present’ is situated in and draws from multiple ideas of a textile past of Ukraine. We attempt to observe and document, nearly in real time, from February 2022 to mid-2023, the configuration and politics of textiles and fashion in the images of war shared in the media stream, and their significance to issues of cultural heritage, nationhood, and selfhood. Identifying these major textile phenomena, which have emerged during the war, reveals shifting, enduring, and conflicting narratives about Ukrainian cultural heritage and textile material culture. They are discussed in five interconnected sections: Zelenskyy’s attire of power and folklore, the vyshyvanka shirt’s rise to prominence, the revival of embroidery in individual women’s practice, resistance through community activism, and the necessity to preserve the archaeological and historical heritage of textiles in Ukraine in the face of destruction. In the case of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, dress has become a potent communication device in mass media, for Ukrainian people and in the international community. Ukraine’s President Zelenskyy, an experienced and effective communicator, initiated this movement by using his persona and changing his attire to embody the figure of a political leader actively engaged in the defense of his country’s freedom.

Character of the War in Ukraine and its Implications for the Czech Republic

Current War in Ukraine represents conventional conflict of high intensity unparallel in contemporary European history. Using a qualitative method, authors present character of the war and identify its key specifics through multi-domain optics. A preliminary set of recommendations is derived from these results for the national defense capability of Czech Republic. Authors conclude that both State and the Armed Forces must increase their readiness for the large-scale conflict.

Paul Ginsborg (1945–2022)

ABSTRACT Paul Ginsborg was an academic historian, public intellectual and grass-roots political activist. He began his academic career at Queens College, Cambridge, as an undergraduate in 1963 and as a Research Fellow from 1968 to 1971, where he completed a doctoral thesis on Daniele Manin and the Venetian revolution of 1848–1849. He became a lecturer at the University of York in 1972 but relinquished this position to teach temporarily in Milan and Turin before returning to Cambridge in 1980 as a fellow of Churchill College and Lecturer in Politics as part of the Cambridge Social and Political Sciences Committee, later promoted to Reader. In 1991 Ginsborg was appointed Professor of Contemporary European History at the University of Florence where he remained until (official) retirement in 2015. He was an editor of Passato e Presente from 1993 to 2002 and was a founder member of the Association for the Study of Modern Italy; at the time of his death in May 2022 he was its honorary president.

Editorial

This special issue of VIEW was inspired by a call from the final conference of the project “European History Reloaded: Curation and Appropriation of Digital Audiovisual Heritage” (CADEAH). The project brought together interdisciplinary expertise in the curation of digital audiovisual heritage, contemporary European history and Digital Humanities to study the ‘afterlife’ of digitized audiovisual heritage once it was made accessible and shared online, something that has seen a great deal of growth throughout the first two decades of this century. What happens to digitized audiovisual heritage once it is shared online? How does audiovisual heritage circulate online? To what extent do users re-use or re-mix audiovisual heritage? And, more specifically from an archival perspective: How do strategies of curation shape the appropriation of digitized heritage? What new perspectives on European history and identity do digital curations and appropriations of audiovisual heritage create? How can audiovisual archives better foster the re-use of Europe’s audiovisual heritage? With this issue we wanted to broaden our view and discuss our insights with scholars from diverse disciplines and with diverse professional backgrounds. These articles showcase the methodological and conceptual approaches that are being used across Europe to understand, and encourage, the use of audiovisual heritage, investigating contemporary practices of re-use and the ways that archives themselves think about these challenges.

Christianity and Violence in the Middle Ages and Early Modern Period: Perspectives from Europe and Japan. Fernanda Alfieri and Takashi Jinno, eds. Studies in Early Modern and Contemporary European History 3. Berlin: De Gruyter, 2021. vi + 196 pp. $91.99.

Christianity and Violence in the Middle Ages and Early Modern Period: Perspectives from Europe and Japan. Fernanda Alfieri and Takashi Jinno, eds. Studies in Early Modern and Contemporary European History 3. Berlin: De Gruyter, 2021. vi + 196 pp. $91.99. - Volume 76 Issue 1

Andrea Di Michele / Filippo Focardi (Eds.), Rethinking Fascism. The Italian and German Dictatorships. (Studies in Early Modern and Contemporary European History, Vol. 4.) Berlin/Boston, De Gruyter 2022

Article Andrea Di Michele / Filippo Focardi (Eds.), Rethinking Fascism. The Italian and German Dictatorships. (Studies in Early Modern and Contemporary European History, Vol. 4.) Berlin/Boston, De Gruyter 2022 was published on October 1, 2022 in the journal Historische Zeitschrift (volume 315, issue 2).

Should Europe disturb historians? On the importance of methodology and interdisciplinarity

AbstractDoes the emergence of the European Union (EU) disrupt the frames of reference of the contemporary history of Europe to such an extent that historians distrust it? It would seem that methodological Euroscepticism exists. European integration arouses scepticism among some in the community of historians of contemporary Europe, since the conceptual underpinnings of that history cannot in themselves account for European integration. This billet expresses, more than a word of caution, a call for enhanced dialogue on the EU as an object of study among the different strands of historical studies and different disciplines. On the one hand, some of the analyses provided by historical studies on contemporary Europe constitute a fertile source for the study and understanding of European integration, notably in the field of history. Using them can stimulate the development in the European studies field of new concepts, new representations and new hypotheses for grasping the EU as a reality and a comparatively new object of academic interest. On the other hand, the critical study of the EU conducted in the specific field of the history of the EU questions and sheds a new light on the analytical categories of contemporary European history. In this regard, the fruitful interaction between history, political geography, law and political science can enrich contemporary European history. Interdisciplinary studies on European integration notably enable us to decentre notions of sovereignty, territory and democracy, which have classically taken the nation state as their reference in broad explanatory narratives of contemporary European history. Research mutualisation would offer all the potential interpretative and analytical benefits of the conceptual and methodological rethink of our various disciplines and of European integration as an object of study.

The 2020 Contemporary European History Prize

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The Sky beyond Versailles: The Paris Peace Treaties in Recent Historiography

Previous articleNext article No AccessReview ArticleThe Sky beyond Versailles: The Paris Peace Treaties in Recent HistoriographyRobert GerwarthRobert GerwarthUniversity College Dublin Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by The Journal of Modern History Volume 93, Number 4December 2021 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/716966 Views: 1336Total views on this site Citations: 1Citations are reported from Crossref © 2021 The University of Chicago. All rights reserved.PDF download Crossref reports the following articles citing this article:Pol Dalmau Catalans and Rifis during the Wilsonian Moment: The Quest for Self-Determination in the Post-Versailles World, Contemporary European History 32, no.11 (Mar 2022): 131–145.https://doi.org/10.1017/S0960777321000680

The dictatorial politics of Soviet President Joseph Stalin (1879-1953)

One of the most important features of the twentieth century in the history of Europe is the emergence of military dictatorships and what these dictatorships played in the world of politics and occupied an important place in modern and contemporary European history, and the most prominent of these dictatorial regimes is the regime of the Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin, who embodied dictatorship in the Union of Soviet Republics Sprawling, and practiced absolute policy on all levels of political, economic and social. He was determining the internal and external policy, and developing plans and programs for that policy. It was known as the Five-Year Plan, after the dictator crushed all his rivals and opponents, and the people approached him as soon as they were suspicious of them. By ruling life as the sole heir to Lenin's empire. Stalin implemented five-year plans for the advancement of the Soviet economy, according to the communist principle. However, those plans were far from communism, which called for people's ownership of economic facilities, as it was overwhelmed by dictatorship and the people were nothing but a tool in the hands of the state, like slaves. On the other fronts, it also killed the Soviet people, as it interfered in various areas of life, specifically religion and belief, as Christians, Muslims and Jews suffered most suffering and persecution, and that stemmed from the communist ideology that infects hostility to religion and is based on atheism.

اثر استراتيجية الرؤوس المرقمة في اكتساب المفاهيم التاريخية لدى طالبات الصف الخامس الادبي في مادة تاريخ أوربا وأمريكا الحديث والمعاصر

The current research aims to find out the effect of the numbered heads strategy to acquire modern and contemporary European and American history, and the researcher took the General Directorate of Education in Baghdad Al-Karkh / First as a community for her research, and intentionally chose Elaph Girls High School as her field, and the research tool was (Acquisition of historical concepts test), consisting of (40) test items, and after applying it to the research sample and treating the data statistically, the results showed the superiority of the experimental group over the control, due to the effectiveness of the strategy and its effect on the acquisition of historical concepts. Key words: (numbered heads, acquisition, historical concepts).

Rethinking collective trauma in the 20th century: Memory, victimhood and the temporality of the Spanish Civil War

This paper aims to address the conceptual and ethical problems that arise when scholars of contemporary European history resort to the notion of collective trauma. Different historical works on the reconstruction of Europe in the second half of the 20th century have relied on the notion of trauma to grasp the evolution of the memory of violence. More specifically, however, this paper focuses on the problems that arise from defining the Spanish Civil War as a collective trauma by examining the antagonistic ways in which the traumas derived from this conflict have been embodied.

The Effect of the Power of Thinking Strategy on Achievement and Development of Life Skills to Start Fifth-Grade Literary Students in History

The current research aims to know the impact of the strategy of thinking power in achievement and development of life skills for fifth-grade literary students in history, by verifying the validity of the following null hypotheses. First, there is no statistically significant difference at the level of significance (0.05) between the average grades of the experimental group students who study modern and contemporary European and American history according to the thinking power strategy and the average scores of the control group students who study the same subject in the usual way in the post-achievement test.Furthermore, there is no statistically significant difference at the level of significance (0.05) between the average grades of the experimental group students who study modern and contemporary European and American history according to the strategy of thinking power in the pre- and post-life skills scale. Finally, there is no statistically significant difference at a significance level (0.05) between the average scores of the control group students who study modern and contemporary European and American history according to the usual method in the pre- and post-life skills scale. To achieve the goal of the research, the researcher adopted a partial controlled experimental design for the experimental and control groups, as well as the pre- and post-tests. The researcher applied the research experiment on a sample of fifth grade literary students in (Thuaiba Al-Islamiya Girls High School) affiliated to the General Directorate of Diyala Governorate Education for the academic year (2018/2019), which was randomly selected. The number of female students in the research sample was (66), of which (32) female students were for the experimental group that would be studied according to the strategy of thinking power, and (34) female students for the control group that would be taught according to the regular method. The researcher conducted equivalence between the two research groups with the following variables: (parents' academic achievement, first course scores for the academic year (2018/2019), IQ test scores, and pre-life skills scale scores.After the researcher determined the scientific subject that she will study for the students of the experimental and control groups in the experiment, namely the chapters (the fifth, sixth and seventh) of the modern and contemporary European and American history curriculum to be taught to the fifth grade literary students for the study year 2018/2019, the researcher formulated (131) behavioural goals according to the six levels for BLOOM classification of the cognitive domain (knowledge, understanding, application, analysis, synthesis and evaluation), daily instructional plans were prepared for the experimental and control groups.

The 2019 Contemporary European History Prize

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Dopo la Grande Guerra Violenza, Stati e Società Tra Adriatico Orientale e Balcani

Dopo la Grande Guerra Violenza, Stati e Società Tra Adriatico Orientale e Balcani

‘Out With the Bases of Death’: Civil Society and Peace Mobilization in Greece During the 1980s

The peace mobilisation against the Euromissiles in the early 1980s constituted one of the biggest mass movements in contemporary European history. The article aims to examine the completely neglected, albeit impressive peace movement in Greece of the 1980s. What mobilised these activists? How did they frame the notion of peace? What were the political conditions under which the discourse of peace became powerful? What was the role of the state and political parties? How did they protest? The article will use national and local press, transnational and Greek peace campaign material, semistructured interviews and polls to provide rich and unique evidence on the way protesters mobilised in recently democratised Greece. Recent accounts of peace mobilisation have emphasized its pan-European character. While acknowledging the merit of transnational approaches, the archival based project, informed by new social movements theory, aims to contextualise cycles of protest mobilisation and highlight the role of national identity that transcended Cold War narratives.

Young men’s experiences of violence and crime in a society emerging from conflict

ABSTRACTPrevious studies have consistently established young men’s over representation in the criminal justice system particularly in relation to interpersonal violence. Despite this, the voice of young men are seldom heard, reducing our understanding of young men’s experience of crime and violence. As Northern Ireland emerged from the longest conflict in contemporary European history following the Good Friday Agreement of 1998, a new generation of young men have grown up in a society with a reconstituted police force, sustained paramilitary ceasefires and increased community cohesion. In 2018, 32 young men aged between 16 and 20 from across Northern Ireland engaged in focus groups exploring their perceptions of crime and violence growing up since 1998. The study found that paramilitaries are still present but the extent to which they are active differs greatly between communities; young men’s literacy around crime in general is limited; issues of personal safety are critical but they do not always develop the necessary skills to avoid violence until later in adolescence; and contact with the police is generally perceived as negative. It is recommended that young men have spaces to reflect on their attitudes and beliefs, develop skills to avoid violence and professionals are trained to engage young men more effectively.

THE SOCIAL BACKGROUND OF BREXIT

The Brexit referendum will remain as a milestone in contemporary European history. The British exit from the EU is not going only to shape future relations between the EU and the UK, but it will shape the relation between Brussels and other member states as well. This study aims to investigate the main claims for the leave campaigns which affected the general opinion to vote for the exit. The two main points investigated in this paper are: first, the historical background regarding the UK and the EU, the reasons for the first refusal to the European integration projects during the 1950, and the changes in the British situation which pushed the UK to seek the membership for a decade before being able to join the EEC in the 1970s; and second, national identity, which affected Britain’s late entry to the EU, and shaped relations between London and Brussels during the British membership. The paper concludes that, unfortunately, British citizens in general were not aware of the full facts regarding the above two points.

Nuevas derechas, viejas izquierdas

Las presentes reflexiones son el resultado de una serie de conversaciones con Enzo Traverso que tuvieron lugar a mediados de noviembre, en la ciudad de Buenos Aires. Traverso es un historiador italiano doctorado en París que, actualmente, se desempeña como docente e investigador en Estados Unidos. Autor de importantes libros sobre historia europea contemporánea, Enzo Traverso ha escrito numerosas reflexiones sobre la práctica historiográfica y sobre la relación entre memoria, política e historia. En su última visita a la Argentina, dictó conferencias y seminarios en el marco del Encuentro Internacional Marx 200. En esta oportunidad, y a propósito de la publicación en español de sus dos últimos libros (Las nuevas caras de la derecha y Melancolía de izquierda. Marxismo, historia y memoria), aceptó debatir sobre las nuevas derechas latinoamericanas, los movimientos feministas, la situación de la izquierda a nivel mundial, y la naturaleza del neoliberalismo. Aquí presentamos y transcribimos el resultado de esas conversaciones.