Historians and the Politics of Commemoration
February 25, 2014
The recent spat between Conservative Education Secretary Michael Gove and the “left-wing historians” he blamed for distorting our view of World War One shows that anniversaries can provoke serious arguments about history and politics. In this case, Gove attacked those such as Regius Professor of History at Cambridge Richard Evans, whom he held responsible for …
Violence in Revolutionary Russia
February 10, 2014
Was the violence that accompanied the Russian Revolution and the early years of the USSR specific to the Bolshevik state, characteristic of its “totalitarianism,” or is violence somehow inherent to the formation of modern states? Did Bolshevik terror merely represent the militarisation of practices begun by the tsarist government, such as categorisation, information gathering, policing, …
The Heresy of Peter Garcias, Toulouse 1247
January 25, 2014
In 1247 a townsman of Toulouse named Peter Garcias was accused of heresy and made subject to a processus (the collection of evidence against the alleged heretic from a series of witnesses) administered by the inquisition. The statements in this case were from monks who claimed to have heard Peter proclaim a series of heretical …
What is the History of Sexuality Again?
January 6, 2014
People have been calling themselves “historians of sexuality” since the early 1990s, and there were plenty of others who dealt with questions of sex, desire and the body before that. How is it then, that we are still asking the question, ‘what is the history of sexuality?’ Perhaps one of the first writers to place …
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