Tijdschrift voor Geschiedenis - Volume 125, Issue 1, 2012

This article discusses how in the late nineteenth century the modernity of the world exhibition was an extremely ambiguous phenomenon. The world exhibition is not only the place par excellence where unbridled belief in the future is celebrated, but is also the place where tension and alienation can be observed. Here the notion of the spectacle has exceptional heuristic potential. On the one hand the spectacle alienate Read More

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries the nervous illness neurasthenia received much attention in the medical world and in society at large. This article concerns the meanings which physicians and patients attached to this condition. Without losing sight of the mental and physical realities of neurasthenia, we claim that these meanings were determined largely by social and cultural factors, and also included gender Read More

In 1928 Dutch physical anthropologist D.J.H. Nyèssen began a study of the racial characteristics of the Javanese. While initially he seemed a promising young researcher, his supervisors called off the project in 1930 because they now considered him a troublemaker with an ‘inflated ego’. Central to this article is the scandal that caused his demise. Nyèssen’s research practice, taking anthropometric measurements in the Ja Read More

In this article the author challenges conventional wisdom concerning the Warsaw Pact by arguing that the smaller allies had much more room for manoeuvre than has generally been assumed. By means of an analysis of the impact of the second Berlin Crisis, the Cuban Missile Crisis, and the Sino-Soviet Split on the Warsaw Pact she shows that the first half of the 1960s witnessed a multilateral development within the alliance, Read More

The question of how nations should deal with a difficult past is one of the great subjects of our time, as is confirmed by the uninterrupted flow of scholarly publications and conferences on transitional justice. In this context Germany and Spain have often been recommended as models. The German model is based on the abolition in the early 1990s of the former German Democratic Republic and its incorporation into the Fed Read More

This article discusses the Belgian parliamentary commission of inquiry (2000-02) that investigated Belgium’s role in the murder of the Congolese prime minister Patrice Lumumba in 1961. Although there is a long tradition of parliamentary inquiries in Belgium, the Lumumba Commission was relatively unusual because it focused on an older past and subcontracted a substantial part of its research to a group of academic exper Read More

The approaches of historical comparison and research into cultural transfers have ineffectively set out to distance historical research from the nation state. This analysis of histoire croisée against the background of historical comparison and cultural transfer concludes that this new approach adds to the historical arsenal by positioning reflexivity at its heart. By institutionalizing the reflexive turn it calls attention to mu Read More