Dutch History Research Articles

Fifty Years of Industrial Policy in the Netherlands: Origins and Legitimacy of Motives for Industrial Policy

This paper presents an overview of fifty years of industrial policy in the Netherlands and discusses the current legitimacy of historic motives. This paper is based on a five year research project in which a committee of the Prof. Mr. B.M. Teldersstichting (the scientific bureau of the Dutch Liberal Party) studied the history of and motives for industrial policy in the Netherlands between 1949 and 1991.The historic overview in this paper describes six distinct eras in the Dutch history of industrial policy. It start in 1949 with post-WWII offensive industrialisation policy, followed by growth policy. This lasted until the first oil crises, after which a more defensive and selective growth era began. In the eighties industrial policy became more offensive again, this time focussing on technology policy. Starting 1989 defensive and even direct state support for companies regained the upper hand, only to end in 1994 when a new minister took over to focus on promoting a knowledge intensive industry.The paper will discuss the eight motives that were used to legitimise specific government intervention in favour of the manufacturing industry in the studied period. These motives were (1) protecting employment, (2) protecting higher value added per employee, (3) promoting networking, (4) stimulation of innovation, (5) reducing the failure of the capital market, (6) avoiding destruction of capital, (7) promoting exports and (8) Matching.In this paper a framework is build by which motives for specific government intervention in favour of the manufacturing industry can be tested on their legitimacy from a liberal economic perspective. This framework consist of three criteria: the market must evidently fail, the government must have an effective instrument to correct the market failure and the cost - benefit relation of the intervention must be reasonable.When applying these criteria to the motives that were mentioned to legitimise industrial policy, this paper will conclude that only the stimulation of innovation is a legitimate motivation. The other seven motives do not hold against the liberal economic framework for industrial policy. The paper did discover another motive for industrial policy that did not came up in the historic overview; providing or protecting collective goods, such as infrastructure, the environment, science and education. This led to the conclusion that the Netherlands has too much industrial policy and that the way forward was to start abolishing historic dead wood in a forest that has grown wild in the last fifty years. The room that is created by abolishing unnecessary old policy can then make room to improve specific collective goods or to lower taxes for companies in general.

A Book Forged in Hell: Spinoza’s Scandalous Treatise and the Birth of the Secular Age (review)

Reviewed by: A Book Forged in Hell: Spinoza’s Scandalous Treatise and the Birth of the Secular Age Michael A. Rosenthal Steven Nadler. A Book Forged in Hell: Spinoza’s Scandalous Treatise and the Birth of the Secular Age. Princeton, NJ-Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2011. Pp. xx + 279. Cloth, $29.95. Spinoza’s Theological-Political Treatise is a difficult book for the modern reader. Unlike the Ethics, whose geometrical form was supposed to appeal to all rational men, Spinoza wrote the Treatise as an intervention in a particular political and religious struggle in the Netherlands in the late 1660s. Steven Nadler uses his considerable knowledge of Dutch history and the broader philosophical context to guide the reader through the arguments of the book and explain the nature of the scandal it provoked. But while it is systematic, this is hardly a dry tome. Nadler begins each chapter with an anecdote—from Spinoza’s correspondence or reception of the work, or an apt parallel—that illuminates the intent [End Page 129] of the argument. Nadler uses these stories to reveal the often personal motivations of the philosophical arguments. Nadler begins with a discussion of the “theological-political” problem as it developed in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, a problem that was felt acutely in the Netherlands. He also addresses the problem of the intended reader of the text and the kind of discourse that Spinoza employed. Unlike Leo Strauss, who made much of the distinction between the exoteric meaning intended for the multitude (vulgus) and the esoteric meaning hidden for the philosopher or potential philosopher, Nadler simply points out that the Treatise’s audience was broader than that of a specialized work like the Ethics, and so he had to be careful with his language. The entire second chapter is devoted to telling the story of Spinoza’s friend Adriaan Koerbagh, who wrote a book in Dutch inspired by his friend Spinoza and was promptly put in prison, where he died. The third chapter provides a clear exposition of Spinoza’s idea of God, his theory of knowledge, and the deflationary account of prophecy that is central to the Treatise. Nowhere are Spinoza’s radical intentions clearer than in his critique of miracles, and Nadler gives us a wonderful chapter that explains how Spinoza is willing to go beyond the positions of other contemporary natural philosophers, like Descartes, Huygens, Hobbes, and Boyle, to the outright refutation of the metaphysical possibility of miracles. At the same time, he shows us how Spinoza adopts the medieval distinction between general and special providence to the terms of his naturalistic system. Most of his earliest readers and later interpreters believed that Spinoza was trying to undermine religion, by revealing the superstitions that produce it, and replace it with a completely secular society governed by reason. Nadler presents a more nuanced view. In the chapter on Scripture, he shows how Spinoza tries to balance between reason and faith. If we attend to Scripture alone, we find that it does have a clear message, one surprisingly free of theological dogma: pursue justice and loving kindness in our actions. Nadler admits that while Spinoza’s goal is often to strip the theological aura from religion, his method is “not meant to rob the Bible of all its authority” (141). Instead, it gives the Bible a new authority, which is exclusively moral. Nadler does not neglect to discuss Spinoza’s political theory based on a modification of Hobbes’s idea of the institution of a state out of the state of nature. And he gives us a nice account, free of anachronistic distortions, of the heralded freedom of philosophizing with which Spinoza ends the work. Nadler himself chooses to conclude with a fascinating discussion of the early reception of the book and the outrage it provoked. It helps underscore the transformative potential that later generations of readers helped unleash. Of course there are a few points on which I would disagree with Nadler’s interpretation. He notes that Spinoza is highly critical of Judaism throughout the Treatise, but he neglects the sense in which the ancient Israelite state was exemplary to its mostly Protestant readers. Spinoza...

‘Een ruwe diamant, maar van het eerste water’. Het Vondelbeeld in de eerste helft van de negentiende eeuw

The figure of Vondel continued to attract a lot of attention in the first decades of the nineteenth century, just as in earlier times. Poets chose him as the subject for their works and literary societies such as the Maatschappij der Nederlandsche Letterkunde debated on the question of who could be claimed to be the greatest poet in Dutch history. Vondel was not only considered a national hero, but also – as a result of the upcoming cult of genius – a literary genius. At the same time, the quest for a contemporary Vondel resulted in identifying the poet Willem Bilderdijk as Vondel's nineteenth-century counterpart. This article focuses on the creation of a new Vondel in the early nineteenth century.

De Slavernij is onze geschiedenis (niet). Over de discursieve strijd om de betekenis van de ntr- televisieserie De Slavernij

Slavery is (Not) Our History: On the Public Debate and Divergent Meanings of the NTR Television Series Slavery This article discusses the debates that followed the broadcasting of Dutch NTR-television series Slavery (De Slavernij) in 2011. While the series was aimed at informing the general public about this silenced part of Dutch history, the subsequent debates on the series revealed fault lines in Dutch society with regard to ideas on how to know and represent slavery adequately. Although most participants, in line of a positivist epistemology, made appeals to historical facts, these debates clearly demonstrated how knowledge and representations of slavery are positioned in a social and academic field that is always characterised by power relations. Postcolonial critics, whose voices are underrepresented in Dutch academia and media, held very different perspectives on the nature of ‘valid’ paradigms, ‘true’ facts, ‘proper’ interpretations, ‘appropriate’ historical referents and representations concerning slavery to people who praised the series. These polarised debates pose the question of how to engage with the history of slavery without resorting to (biological) essentialism that is precisely one of its potent legacies ‘we’ want to overcome.

A forced but passionate marriage: The changing relationship between past and present in Dutch history education 1945–1979

Although the history of history education is an under-researched topic worldwide, the international literature about history education contains a clear image of the historical development of the school subject. This image basically consists of a sharp dichotomy between traditional history education, which was largely insensitive to topical affairs and focused on tradition; and modern history education, which placed topical affairs at the centre of attention and critically engaged pupils in the study of history. Despite being very pervasive, this image does not do justice to the complex relationship between past and present in history education. In this article I will attempt to reassess this one-dimensional image by examining the changing relationship between past and present in Dutch history textbooks published between 1945 and 1979. More specifically, the analysis concentrates on the question of how these textbooks dealt with matters of proximity and distance on multiple levels, and how this affected the relationship between past and present in the course of time.

Play and Democracy

In this essay I argue that the work of the Dutch historian Johan Huizinga is an important resource for contemporary democratic theory because his employment of the concept of play illustrates both the strengths and weaknesses of agonistic thought. I employ a reading of Huizinga to explore three central problems of contemporary agonism: the distinction between antagonism and agonism; the representative or expressive character of the agon; and the shaping and limiting of the space of the agon by the materials with which we play democratic games. Reading Huizinga reveals the importance of a consideration of the social relations and material conditions that shape the playful features of democratic contestation. But it also warns against the idealization of democratic contestation and the contesting subject that occurs in contemporary agonistic thought as a result of privileging the autonomy and priority of play and extruding it from the wider economy of agonism.

Psychical research and parapsychology interpreted

One of the reasons the history of parapsychology and its ancestor psychical research is intriguing is because it addresses a central issue: the boundaries of science. This article provides an overview of the historiography of parapsychology and presents an approach to investigate the Dutch history of parapsychology contributing to the understanding of this central theme. In the first section the historical accounts provided by psychical researchers and parapsychologists themselves are discussed; next those studies of sociologists and historians understanding parapsychology as deviant and even potentially revolutionary are dealt with; third, more contemporary studies are examined whereby enterprises such as parapsychology are understood as central to the culture in which they arose. On the basis of this analysis a new direction in the historiography of the subject is suggested in the fourth section, centred upon the relation between parapsychology and psychology in the Netherlands throughout the 20th century. In the Netherlands not only were pioneering psychologists such as Gerard Heymans (1857–1930) actively involved in experiments into telepathy, the first professor in parapsychology in the world – Wilhelm Tenhaeff (1894–1981) – was appointed in 1953 at Utrecht University and in the 1970s and 1980s parapsychology had its own research laboratory at Utrecht University in the division of psychology. This unique situation in the Netherlands deserves scholarly attention and makes an interesting case to investigate the much-neglected connections between the fields of psychology and parapsychology in the 20th century. The connections between psychology and parapsychology might help us to understand why parapsychology came to be regarded as a pseudoscience.

“The Hero As Historian”: Pieter Geyl and the Condition of Carlyle after Hitler

“The Hero As Historian”:Pieter Geyl and the Condition of Carlyle after Hitler Owen Dudley Edwards (bio) I. If we were to fasten a postscript to Thomas Carlyle’s 1841 On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History, entitled “The Hero as Historian,” we should probably find that the twentieth century demanded more physical and mental courage of its historians than the nineteenth. The hero-as-historian of Carlyle and totalitarianism, towering over the rest of us, is the Dutch historian Pieter Geyl (1887–1966). Geyl’s place in Anglophone historiography is secured by his essays on British historians and “The American Civil War and the Problem of Inevitability.” 1 In European studies, his volumes on the Netherlands in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and his Napoleon, For and Against, published in 1949 but initially written during his imprisonment by the Nazis, should be held in admiration far beyond our lifetimes. No more heroic entry in Who’s Who exists than Geyl’s. Among the notable events of his extraordinary life, the entry lists: in 1924 [Geyl’s] title changed into Professor of Dutch History and Institutions in the University of London; resigned 1935; Professor of Modern History, University of Utrecht, 1938–68; 7 Oct. 1940 arrested as hostage, spent thirteen months in Buchenwald, then over two years in various internment camps in Holland, released 14 Feb. 1944; 28 Nov. 1942 dismissed by Reichskommissar from professorship on ground of suspect “general mentality,” restored after liberation of Holland…. May 1941 elected Reichskommissar, confirmed by Queen on liberation of Holland. (Who Was Who 421–22) The entry concludes with a list of visiting lectureships and professorships in the United States and in Britain, awards from both countries and from the Netherlands, honorary degrees, a British CBE, and “Ordre pour le mérite (Germany), 1959.” [End Page 167] Geyl was not, of course, the only Dutch historian with war service as a prisoner in Nazi concentration camps, but he was the greatest, as his prodigious list of prestigious publications in Who’s Who bears witness. Perhaps no comparable hero-as-historian in World War II could be named, other than the great Marc Bloch of France, tortured and shot while in the Resistance. The blazing pride of Geyl’s listing of his imprisonments, degradation, and dismissal by the Nazis almost parodies the distinctions with which most of the rest of Who’s Who invited attention to their achievements, but the state decoration from the Bundesrepublik Deutschland in 1959 bore the warmth of generous reconciliation. I never met Geyl, but I once had a long interview with his successor as Professor of Dutch History and Institutions in London, Gustaag Johannes Renier, and at the beginning of a fascinating conversation, he asked me to do him the honor of calling him “Professor Renier” on the ground that he regarded tenure of the chair that had been previously occupied by his friend and mentor as his own greatest claim to respect. S. T. Bindoff, professor of history at Queen Mary College, London, translator of Geyl’s work and author of Tudor England, a dazzling work of scholarship that may have outsold all of Geyl’s books together, made it clear to me that the latter Geyl was the greatest historian he had known, and that must have included all of the active great historians of the UK in his time. 2 Geyl’s war heroism was incidental to their admiration, but it becomes vital when we look at his ideas on Carlyle. His twenty-two years in London, six as a journalist including World War I (when the Dutch were neutral), gave him primary authority in recent British history, particularly in English cultural self-image. It did not necessarily produce historiographical Anglophilia. The English in 1903 were on the plateau of their imperial self-assurance, despite their prewar symptoms of unease, and as the imperial preoccupation diminished after the war, a somewhat xenophobic insular superiority took its place—the disillusioned intellectuals of Bloomsbury and elsewhere being nonetheless England-obsessed for all their mockery of past propaganda. Renier, who also followed Geyl in becoming a Dutch journalist in London, would write a hard-hitting but fair...

History Education and the Claims of Society

The political use and instrumentalization of history is a central theme within the historiography of history education. Neither history nor education is a politically neutral domain; history education is and has always been a highly politicized phenomenon. For his recent article on the development of history education in England, Germany, and the Netherlands throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the Dutch history didactician Arie Wilschut chose the significant title, “History at the Mercy of Politicians and Ideologies.” History education, Wilschut argues, has, in all three countries, continually—with a short break in the 1960s and 1970s—been instrumentalized by national politics to the detriment of unbiased interpretations of the past.

Transnational Connections: Special Issue Introduction

Transnational ConnectionsSpecial Issue Introduction Nathan Perl-Rosenthal and Evan Haefeli Every century, on the anniversary of Henry Hudson’s 1609 voyage to the New World, New York remembers its Dutch connection. In 1809 the members of the newly incorporated New-York Historical Society enjoyed a commemorative speech followed by a banquet; the first number of the society’s Collections, issued two years later, reprinted Hudson’s journals of his voyages.1 For the 1909 tercentenary, New York State established a special commission to organize the festivities. Its final report, which ran to an astounding two thousand pages, detailed events ranging from an exhibit at the Metropolitan Museum of Art to a program of “aquatic sports.” Most of the events hewed closely to the commemoration’s overall narrative, which depicted the active Dutch role in American history as ending in the mid-seventeenth century.2 [End Page 227] Led by New York City’s annual Five Dutch Days program, the state again celebrated its links to the Low Countries in 2009. Yet the quadricentennial differed markedly from the earlier anniversaries. Instead of focusing on the Dutch presence in early New York, the 2009 celebration looked more broadly at the Netherlands and its links with the United States—ranging from tastings of modern Asian-inflected Dutch cuisine to performances by avant-garde Dutch theater and dance companies.3 This shift from commemorating the local to invoking the global corresponded to the fading influence of old-line Dutch families in New York society as well as to the growing cachet that Dutch companies and cities (especially Amsterdam) have in the United States.4 But the shift also reflects the way in which the globalization of the 1990s and early 2000s drew the attention of scholars and the general public to the United States’ deep ties with the wider world. The 2009 conference at Columbia University at which versions of the papers in this special issue were first presented, entitled Cities in Revolt: The Dutch-American Atlantic, ca. 1650–1815, reflected the distinctively international and global spirit of the Hudson quadricentennial. For early Americanists, work on the Dutch has long been associated primarily with the regional history of the mid-Atlantic, where several thousand Dutch colonists remained after the United Provinces ceded its territorial claims to England in 1674.5 Rather than look again at this well-known group and its legacy, Cities [End Page 228] in Revolt explored an equally important and comparatively little-studied aspect of the Dutch role in early American history: the extensive, fruitful links that colonial North America and the early United States developed with the Dutch Republic and its Atlantic colonies from roughly 1680 to 1815. To tackle this topic, the conference moved outside the disciplinary bounds of early American history: roughly half of the participants were scholars specializing in the history of the Netherlands and its Atlantic empire. One goal of this special issue, “Anglo-Dutch Revolutions,” is to share with early Americanists some of the new research on Dutch-American connections that came out of the 2009 conference. The papers we have chosen to present here focus on the first age of revolutions, circa 1760–1815, a period during which the web of exchanges between North America and the Dutch Atlantic played an especially important role in transforming the political and economic life of each region. We also selected the papers with the aim of introducing early Americanists to particularly relevant work by Europeanists working on related topics. The majority of the essays in this issue are the work of historians of the Dutch Republic and empire based in Europe. They include the first English-language publications by two authors and a first publication in an early Americanist venue for a third. To introduce these papers, which necessarily engage with the complex and relatively unfamiliar terrain of Dutch history, we offer an orientation to the history and historiography of the Dutch Atlantic empire in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The second and broader aim of this special issue is to help develop approaches to writing the transnational history of eighteenth-century America in the Atlantic world. In the second part of the introduction, we propose...

Engaging the Atlantic: New Routes, New Responsibilities

Engaging the Atlantic might be useful, even instrumental, in putting together and taking apart the elements of the colonial on both shores of the divide - if it is conceived as providing possibilities for network analysis and comparative colonialities rather than as an expansion of the tradition of imperial Spanish, Portuguese, British, Dutch history. Equatorial Guinea, a Portuguese and later a Spanish colony, is an Atlantic site of colonial convergence. Its history presents the opportunity to approximate the field of study to other latitudes by examining the branches of Portuguese and Spanish imperial practices in America and Africa and, in passing, questioning traditional definitions of area, regional, period and national studies. In rethinking Iberian and Latin American Studies across the Atlantic, and in opening the field of inquiry, we add a spatial dimension to the colonial haunting, which enables us to alter our traditional perception of body flow, nuancing hegemony and shifting locus. In this colonial equation Africa no longer figures as the passive departure point for a one-way traffic, the quintessential homeland of the diaspora, forever a place of origin and purity. The case study presented here is in several instances a compelling example of a process in reverse

The Dream of a Perfect History

Previous articleNext article No AccessThe Dream of a Perfect HistoryS. P. CERASANOS. P. CERASANO Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUS Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Renaissance Drama Volume 402012What is Renaissance Drama? Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/rd.40.41917498 Views: 18Total views on this site Copyright © 2012 Northwestern University PressPDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

Hating school, loving mathematics: On the ideological function of critique and reform in mathematics education

Students’ engagement with fictions in the form of “word problems” plays an important role in classroom practice as well as in theories of mathematical learning. Drawing on the Dutch historian Johan Huizinga and the Austrian philosopher Robert Pfaller, I show that this activity can be seen as a form of play or game, where it is pretended that mathematics is useful in real life in a way that it is not. With Pfaller, I argue that play can take hold of the imagination of the players, infusing everyday life with meaning borrowed from the imagery of the play and that these effects are more powerful when the play is forced and takes an institutionalized form. I show that mathematics education does in fact have these characteristics, including sophisticated mechanisms for translating in-game performance (test scores) to real-life goods (grades and examinations). A central theme of the article is the perceived discrepancy between mathematics education as it is, and how it supposedly could and should be in light of the properties of mathematics. The analysis implies that this gap actually is an effect of play and thus an inherent property of mathematics education itself.

De extrapositie van het subject in passieve zinnen - Diachrone trends en motivaties

This paper presents a diachronic case study of extraposition of subjects in passive clauses with a finite form of the auxiliary verb worden ‘to become’. The data are taken from a historical corpus of legal texts dating from 1250 until 1800. The study shows that subjects of passive clauses appear relatively frequently in extraposition in view of the fact that subjects in general encode highly topical participants, which are preferably placed in the beginning of the clause. This is explained by the fact that subjects of passive clauses encode patient participants, and are thus less topical than more prototypical subjects. Furthermore, the study shows that subjects of worden-clauses are increasingly extraposed in the investigated time period. This development is related to the fact that the grammaticalization of passive clauses is accompanied by an increased usage of sentential subjects, which are systematically placed in extraposition throughout the history of Dutch.

INTRODUCTION: THE METAPHOR OF HISTORICAL DISTANCE

ABSTRACTWhat does “historical distance” mean? Starting with Johan Huizinga, the famous Dutch historian who refused to lecture on contemporary history, this introductory article argues that “historical distance” is a metaphor used in a variety of intellectual contexts. Accordingly, the metaphor has ontological, epistemological, moral, aesthetic, as well as methodological connotations. This implies that historical distance cannot be reduced to a single “problem” or “concept.” At the same time, this wide variety of meanings associated with distance helps explain why an easily recognizable tradition of scholarly reflection on historical distance does not exist. In a broad survey of nineteenth‐ and twentieth‐century historical theory, this article nonetheless attempts to show that distance has been a major, if seldom explicitly articulated, theme in European and American philosophy of history. In doing so, it pays special attention to those few authors who in recent years have taken up the metaphor for critical study. Finally, the paper summarizes some of the main arguments put forward in the articles comprising this issue on historical distance.

The Standard Language Situation in the Low Countries: Top-Down and Bottom-Up Variations on a Diaglossic Theme

This paper reviews the available evidence in support of a diaglossic account (Auer 2005, 2011) of the 20th century history of Belgian and Netherlandic Dutch, whereby the national varieties of Dutch are argued to be developing towards a stratificational configuration without discrete intermediate strata between the base dialects and the standard. However, we show that the processes leading to diaglossia differ significantly in the two varieties. While the recent history of Netherlandic Dutch is characterized by downward norm relaxation (top to bottom), Belgian Dutch is characterized by bottom-up (re)standardization. Building on a refined version of Auer’s diaglossic model, we reflect on the exact nature of linguistic standardization in the Low Countries and outline scenarios for the further development of Belgian and Netherlandic Dutch.

A CENTURY IS A SHORT TIME – NEW PERSPECTIVES ON THE ANGLO-BOER WAR/EDITED BY A CENTURY IS A SHORT TIME – NEW PERSPECTIVES ON THE ANGLO-BOER WAR BY INA SNYMAN, IAN LIEBENBERG, GERT VAN DER WESTHUIZEN, MARIAAN ROOS

The editors claim that this book attempts to further stimulate debate onthe Anglo-Boer War of 1899-1902. Therefore, they included contributions fromdifferent disciplines, but with the main emphasis still on historical writing. Theystrived to continue the tradition to regard all historical debate as temporary andwithin the expression by the Dutch historian, Pieter Geyl, that history is a debatewithout end. From that point of view, the publication is timely and has thepotential to enhance our comprehension of one of the events that had a profoundinfluence on the history of South Africa. Because of the divergent approaches ofthe different authors, the different contributions are briefly analysed before a valuejudgement on the publication as a whole is made.

Footnotes to the patent game: how does homo ludens enforce patent rights in Hungary?

Can we imagine the patent case as a play? As Johann Huizinga, the Dutch historian and cultural theorist writes, “The lawsuit can be regarded as a game of chance, a contest or a verbal battle.” According to Huizinga, science is actually a play itself, thus scientific recognition is nothing more than the solution of a task of a play. In this context, a patent suit is nothing more than a play played with the play (in other words a ‘Game of the Game’). In our view in an ideal world the enforcement of patent rights should be a game of chess, where all the information is available to both players and the rules are simple and unquestionable. All players accept, understand and interpret the rules the same way. The referee has no role to play. However presently the enforcement of patent rights in Europe feels like playing poker with a strong element of gambling. In the course of current judicial proceedings in Hungary, in many cases, the advocate may even perceive the gambling element in the play of the lawsuit as dominant.

Van zwarte bladzijde naar zwartboek. Vijfenzestig jaar beeldvorming over naoorlogse interneringskampen

From black page to black book: 65 years of representation of post-war internment camps Over 100,000 collaborators were imprisoned in internment camps after the liberation of the Netherlands on 5 May 1945. During the first few months many wrongs happened in these camps, which is why this episode was very soon characterized as a 'black page' in Dutch history. More than sixty-five years later this image of a 'black page' has hardly changed, quite the contrary. Repeatedly the internment camps have been rediscovered as a taboo in Dutch history. Films, documentaries and publications about the internment camps that were made in recent decades gave them an even worse image, that of a 'black book'. Remarkably, these representations of the internment camps were always based on the same source: a highly biased 1949 pamphlet by a former collaborator disclosing the abuses in the camps for the first time. In this article Grevers discusses how different actors persisted in using this image in the media during six decades and what they tried to achieve by doing so.

Geschiedenis als bindmiddel? - Het geschiedenisonderwijs aan de colleges en athenea in de Zuidelijke Nederlanden onder het bewind van Willem I

In an article published in 1967 in Tijdschrift voor Geschiedenis, the Dutch historian Riemer Reinsma described William I’s unifying policy regarding history education as a failure. According to Reinsma, William I and his government never succeeded in their plan to introduce one national history at school that contained both Northern and Southern history. In this article, William I’s policy concerning history education will be re-examined by means of new source material, such as school programmes and inspection reports. The main question that will be posed, is whether this policy was really aiming that much on unification as Reinsma has claimed?