Tijdschrift voor Geschiedenis - Volume 122, Issue 1, 2009

The welfare state’s turn towards neoliberalism in the 1980s fundamentally altered the structure of the American economy. Despite impressive growth, inequality increased, and both public and private debt soared. This article explores various arguments concerning the roles which Ronald Reagan and supply-side economic theory played in this transition. While a certain consensus has been reached as to the short-term effects of Reagan’s tax and monetary policy, there is still much uncertainty as to the wider implications of these measures, and of the resulting debt and inequality, for American society and politics in the future.

In the 1950s European colonialism was more vigorous than is often assumed. Despite growing international resistance, European colonial powers tried fervently to cling on to the remnants of their once great empires. Yet, little is known of the way they perceived and acted towards each others’ attempts to keep their empires alive. This article explores this topic by studying how the Netherlands and France interacted diplomatically concerning colonial matters. It shows that The Hague and Paris, which in the 1950s were often at loggerheads concerning the future of the EEC, put their differences aside when it came to colonial issues, and actively worked together in order to maintain their power overseas. In doing so, they acted against Cold War logic. In contrast to the United States, their strongest NATO-ally, the Europeans both advocated and supported a policy of no compromise when it came to anti-colonial nationalism. American fear that Moscow would take advantage of the resentment this aroused in the non-western world was not shared in either The Hague or Paris. Rather both the Dutch and the French thought it was American appeasement of Afro-Asian (national) ambitions in North-Africa and the Indonesian archipelago that formed the greatest threat to European and Western influence overseas.

Since a broad public debate on German suffering was initiated in the late 1990’s, the German experience of the allied bombings has often been portrayed as a taboo, or, in W.G. Sebalds words, a ‘family secret’. Recent research, however, has disproved this taboo thesis. In this article the recent volumes edited by Helmut Schnatz, Bill Niven, Dietmar Süß, and Jörg Echternkamp, and the dissertation projects of Jörg Arnold and Malte Thiessen are reviewed. While many of the articles in these edited volumes give interesting case studies and insights, their conclusions on the workings of German memory of the air war remain somewhat fragmented. The works of Arnold on the local memory cultures of Magdeburg and Kassel, and Thiessen’s analysis of Hamburg, which are discussed in this article, provide a more detailed perspective. Arnold and Thiessen offer excellent and thoroughly empirical studies on the importance of the air war for local memory. Moreover, these works make clear the ease with which memory of the allied bombings could be linked to political issues in the present. With this Arnold and Thiessen have deepened our insights into the importance of the bombings for local memory and post-war identity. What remains unclear, however, is to what extent their conclusions can be applied to the national memory discourse of the Federal Republic and the GDR. Arnold’s and Thiessen’s studies do not show whether the allied bombings became as important for national memory as they obviously were for the local communities of Kassel, Magdebrurg, and Hamburg.

Hygiene, good health, and education have always been closely linked in the history of mankind. In this article we pay attention to the role of sea hospitals within the broader movement and struggle for improved hygiene. They were built for children suffering from rachitis and scrofulosis. The focus here is on the French sea hospital at Berck-sur-Mer (founded in 1861) and the two Belgian sea hospitals (founded in 1881 and 1884). In the first part, the analysis deals with the meaning of a growing medicalisation of childhood. We therefore concentrate on the transition from a ‘hospice’ to ‘hospital’. The relationship between the medical dimensions of the sea hospitals and their pedagogical dimensions is at the heart of the second part. The normalising techniques of the sea hospitals are regarded as central to the reconstruction of childhood, aiming at making children part of the social body.

The rural has always been an established field of historical research. However, over the course of the twentieth century, the countryside was subject to significant changes in its spatial and social structure. These transformations made ‘rurality’ an increasingly problematic notion and encouraged a debate regarding definition in which mainly social scientists, geographers, and planning experts were engaged. In this article, the author attempts to evaluate changing views of the rural in the academic milieu. The different approaches through which the countryside has been studied may serve as signposts for historians of the twentieth century. It is argued that investigating the evolving discourse and the social representations of rurality – within multiple societal spheres and amongst a variety of actors – is very fruitful for contemporary historical studies, especially when examining highly urbanized countries such as the Netherlands or Belgium. This strand of research is not a futile or purely theoretical exercise; on the contrary, it will allow historians better to understand the social, cultural, economic, and political processes operating in the twentieth-century countryside.

This article explores the historical actors and societal factors existing at the beginning of land consolidation as an instrument of Dutch rural planning. The call for a legal framework to redistribute fragmented parcels in an efficient and rational manner, was growing from the 1890’s onwards. Because of the ideological barriers in the political center, in which the division between public and private interests was the most important aspect, this framework was heavily disputed. Social minded, liberal reformers of the middle class, mobilized political pressure. The government was ready to take action, when the First World War made the national economy fragile and revealed the necessity to become more self-sufficient. In 1924 the first Land Consolidation Act was passed, but obstacles blocked a widespread use of the instrument. These obstacles were lowered in the 1930’s. Economic recession gave way to an active policy for the improvement of the countryside, for which the Land Consolidation Act was the judicial vehicle.

Jacques Van Doorn’s extremely critical book on German socialism has received in The Netherlands little criticism itself. In this article the author argues that the book does indeed deserve much scrutiny. He is of the opinion that Van Doorn misinterprets German socialism and as a sociologist overlooks the important work that has been done by historians.