Weimar: Beyond Gloom and Glitter
June 27, 2013
Our view of Germany’s Weimar Republic (1919-1933) has been conditioned by its successor, the Third Reich. Weimar calls to mind images of decadence, the acidic cabarets of Berlin and the discordant songs of Weil and Brecht, not to mention the brutal visions of post-war degeneration and gluttony painted by George Grosz and Otto Dix. This …
The Cost of Marriage
June 18, 2013
How much money do you need to get married these days? According to The Guardian (7/8/2010) the wedding day alone is said to cost the average British couple £21,000 (up from £12,000 in 2003) and tales circulate of newlyweds hawking their wedding presents on ebay in order to recoup marital expenses. And that is without …
US Foreign Policy in the American Century and After
June 14, 2013
Two key arguments have dominated the historiography of international relations since 1945 – the last half of the “American century.” The first of these stresses that US foreign policy since that date has been guided mainly by economic interests, while the second supposes that the end of the Cold War and the emergence of the …
Britain’s Cold War in the Caribbean
May 30, 2013
Some historians such as the bullish right-wing TV pundit Niall Ferguson have tried to celebrate the British Empire as a kind of civilising mission and a genuinely co-operative endeavour between coloniser and colonised. Britain’s imperium, they suggest, should be a model for the current troubled nation-building efforts of the USA. It might be thought that …
Dark Age Climate Change
May 14, 2013
In recent years historians have challenged the idea of the “Dark Ages.” From the Renaissance onwards many writers began to think of this period in European history, roughly from the fall of Rome in the 5th century AD up to the first millennium, as an era of social and cultural disintegration, lawlessness and barbarism. Historians …
Angry white men?
May 1, 2013
Have you ever wondered why the political beneficiaries of the current crisis tend to be right-wing populist parties such as UKIP in Britain, the Tea Party in America, or the Five Star movement in Italy? With UKIP now contesting 73 % of seats in the local council elections in Britain on the 2nd May, as …
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